Overall, Michael Jackson’s net worth is estimated
at $500 million, and the net worth of his
sister, Janet Jackson, is said to be $175 million

With a Glastonbury show and a Las Vegas
residency, the singer is back in the limelight – which is good
reason to celebrate her as the pioneer she has been, writes Nick
Levine.

• By Nick Levine

24 June
2019

Janet Jackson’s upcoming appearance at this year’s Glastonbury
Festival has already made headlines. When the singer tweeted
the poster for the internationally-renowned British weekender in
March, fans spotted that she’d doctored the original image to
promote herself from fifth on the bill to first, leapfrogging
headline acts The Killers, The Cure and Stormzy, plus Kylie
Minogue, who’s playing the Sunday afternoon ‘legends’ slot.

It was a brazen and amusing bit of self-aggrandizement from the
US star, who is back in the limelight this summer, with her new Las
Vegas residency being hailed as a return to “topform” when it began last month. But many fans
felt it was more than justified. For, despite a glittering career
that includes 10 US number one hits, estimated global record sales
totalling 100 million, and a recent induction into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame, Janet remains a strangely underrated pop
icon.

Janet’s iconic career is especially impressive
because it’s involved having to emerge from the shadow of a wildly
successful older sibling. When she dropped her eponymous debut
album in September 1982, Michael Jackson was just months away from
unleashing Thriller, the pop culture phenomenon that became the
best-selling album of all time.

Performing as the Jackson Five, Janet’s brothers had been a
popular act since the early ’70s, and being a Jackson surely gave
Janet a head start in the highly competitive music industry. But it
didn’t guarantee her a hit: neither 1982’s forgettable Janet
Jackson album nor 1984’s slightly stronger follow-up Dream
Street,which includes an almost-quaint duet with British pop
legend Cliff Richard, sold very well. Their largely characterless
blend of contemporary pop sounds offered few clues that by the
mid-90s, Janet would be the highest-paid recording artist in
history.

Janet’s creative and commercial breakthrough came in 1986, when
she teamed up with Minneapolis-based producers Jimmy Jam and Terry
Lewis to make Control, a game-changing dance-pop-R&B album that
paved the way for the new jack swing sound of the
late-’80s. When Janet declared “this time, I’m gonna do it my way,”
on the title track, she meant it: Jam and Lewis’s sleek, teak-tough
beats gave her a state-of-the-art platform to establish her own
powerful pop persona – that of a strong, self-assured young woman
who had no time for “nasty boys”. Then, with 1989’s formidableJanet
Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 album, she became more overtly
political. “Join voices in protest to social injustice,” she sang
on the title track. “A generation full of courage, come forth with
me.”

 Long before Beyoncé, Janet was exploring how navigating
the world as a black woman is never not political – Dr Kirsty
Fairclough

“Long before Beyoncé was flashing the word ‘feminist’ in the
background while performing on stage, Janet was exploring how
navigating the world as a black woman is never not political,” says
Dr Kirsty Fairclough from the School of Arts and Media at the
University of Salford. “Her music and image melded to explicitly
address racism and sexism with songs about trying to flourish as a
person in an environment ruled by both. In a 1987 interview
following the release of Control, Jackson responded to a question
about being a feminist by saying, ‘If it’s someone, a woman, who’s
taking control of her life as well as her career, then I say that I
am a feminist.’”

These two albums contain some of Janet’s most enduring songs,
including What Have You Done for Me Lately?, Escapade and Nasty, on
which she delivers an iconic rebuke to disrespectful males: “No, my
first name ain’t baby – it’s Janet, Miss Jackson if you’re nasty.”
They also established her as one of the most dynamic music video
creators of all time. When I Think of You is a joyous homage to
old-school Hollywood musicals directed by Absolute Beginners’
Julien Temple; The Pleasure Principle contains a dazzling dance
performance from Janet that peaks with a famous chair sequence
that Britney Spears referenced in her 2000 video for
Stronger.

A sexually-liberated trailblazer

Subsequent albums such as 1993’s janet and 1997’s The Velvet
Rope found her fully embracing her sexuality in a way that still
feels groundbreaking today. Her 1993 single If is a heady sexual
fantasy whose video has been praised for portraying interracial
lust. “There are songs on The Velvet Rope that would make Beyoncé
in [sexually-charged] Partition mode blush,” BBC Radio 1 DJ Clara
Amfo tells BBC Culture. “Her unashamed sexual liberation,
especially for black women, is something that’s still so
taboo.”

At the same time, musically, she began to shift into seductive,
slow-burn R&B – see brilliant ’90s singles such as the
Grammy-winning That’s the Way Love Goes and Joni Mitchell-sampling
Got ‘til It’s Gone. But even then, she never abandoned the
dancefloor. Two of her biggest mid-career hits were 1997’s Together
Again, a poignant house-pop track inspired by a friend she lost to
Aids, which cemented her status as an LGBT icon, and 2001’s All for
You, an irresistible neo-disco song that spent seven weeks at
number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

Janet collaborated almost exclusively with Jam and Lewis until
2004’s Damita Jo album, which also included contributions from
several other producers including Kanye West. Amfo notes that “her
consistency in working with the same producers allowed her to hone
a sound that is so distinctively her”. Damita Jo became Janet’s
first commercial disappointment since 1984, failing to top the
Billboard 200 chart or to yield a sizeable hit single.

Super Bowl sexism

The album arrived just two months after one of the most
notorious moments of her career: the so-called ‘wardrobe
malfunction’ during her performance with Justin Timberlake at the
2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show, which saw her breast briefly visible
on live TV. Both artists said afterwards that the idea was simply
for Timberlake to rip away Janet’s leather bustier to reveal a red
lace bra underneath, but that the ‘malfunction’ caused her entire
breast to be exposed.

Though her nipple was only exposed for about half a second, the
incident brought back into popular consciousness a long-held
negative trope surrounding black female sexuality – Dr Kirsty
Fairclough

The incident caused a global furore: Michael Powell, chairman of
US media regulator the Federal Communications Commission, told a
Senate panel that it was “a new low for prime time television”.
Though ‘Janet Jackson’ became the most searched-for person on the
internet that year, her reputation was instantly tarnished. Walt
Disney World even decided to remove  a life-size
statue of Mickey Mouse dressed in her signature Rhythm Nation
outfit.

Last year a report alleged that after the incident,
Les Moonves, the chairman and CEO of CBS, which screened the Super
Bowl, became “fixated” with derailing her career and effectively
blacklisted her from Viacom channels including MTV. Moonves,
who stepped down from the network in September 2018 following
accusations of sexual harassment and abuse, is said to have been
incensed because he believed the incident was a deliberate attempt
to whip up controversy that Janet had not shown enough remorse
for.

Whatever the truth behind this allegation, there’s no doubting
that it affected her career in a way that Timberlake, who was
equally involved in the incident, largely managed to escape.
“Though her nipple was only exposed for about half a second, what
the incident triggered was to bring back into popular consciousness
a long-held negative trope surrounding black female sexuality,”
Fairclough says. “This is essentially the idea that black women are
‘dangerous’ and ‘irrational’ sexual beings that must be controlled.
Her career in the mainstream has never fully recovered since this
moment.”

The Janet revival

But in recent years, Janet’s reputation has definitely enjoyed a
revival. Her 2015 album Unbreakable debuted at number one on the
Billboard 200, and her recent tours have won appreciative reviews.
“When [acclaimed French singer-songwriter] Christine and the Queens
did a segment on my radio show called Your Song [in which guests
select a song that is special to them], she chose Janet’s The
Pleasure Principle and she was just so elated when she was speaking
about it,” says Clara Amfo. “Janet has and continues to be a
template for so many artists: Christine, Ciara, fellow Glastonbury
performer Janelle Monáe, MNEK, Beyoncé, the list goes on.”

Her talent gets overshadowed because she’s the ‘baby Jackson’,
but it is her own, outside of her family – MNEK

Indeed, British artist-producer MNEK tells BBC Culture
enthusiastically: “Janet’s songwriting and performing has always
been so sophisticated. I’ve always admired her showmanship and how
she was able to wrap lyrics with her voice in such a smooth way.
[Some] people say her voice is too soft or that she can’t sing, but
this obviously isn’t true. Janet has actually got a beautiful
voice.”

MNEK also praises Janet for “really
drilling in the importance of albums to the public – that gets
overshadowed because she’s the ‘baby Jackson’, but her talent is
her own, outside of being a Jackson”. Amfo goes a step further,
saying that a key part of Janet’s legacy lies in inspiring others
by “gaining independence from a family with an overbearing
history”. Sadly, it’s arguable that this family history continues
to cast a shadow on Janet’s individual achievements. Dr Kirsty
Fairclough says that historical sexual abuse allegations levelled
at Michael Jackson in this year’s documentary Leaving Neverland
“inevitably influences mainstream coverage of Janet and her
family”.

Janet’s new Las Vegas show, Janet Jackson: Metamorphosis, begins
with a performance of Empty, an excellent trip-hop-inflected track
from The Velvet Rope. Released 22 years ago, its lyrics seem to
have anticipated society’s growing reliance on online
relationships. “Is this a new way to love? Never face to face, is
it enough?” Janet ponders. Her revival of this very prescient song
in 2019 reflects how, knockbacks notwithstanding, Janet remains
supremely capable of stewarding her own legacy, and doing so
smartly. This weekend’s Glastonbury set gives her a welcome
opportunity to remind us that she’s one of her generation’s most
thrilling and visionary performers.

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