In writing these blog posts, I’ve found a related-but-not-quite-synonymous kind of album alongside the magnum opus. Call it the inventa opus: the work of discovery. It’s the album where an artist finally breaks free of their early-career shakiness and finds their own voice – one which may still carry the mark of their influences but is nonetheless a new and distinct thing. Sonic Youth had it with Sister and its leveraging of songcraft with noise experimentalism, and Autechre had it with Tri repetae and their commitment to minimalist glitch. Sometimes the inventa opus and the magnum opus are one in the same, sometimes not.
In the case of Control, it isn’t. But there is perhaps no clearer inventa opus out of all the albums we’ve covered. After all, the title track and first song begins with Janet Jackson monologuing: “This is a story about control… my control… control of what I say, control of what I do… and this time, I’m gonna do it my way.” Mission statement made. And after that brief bit of telling, she goes on to show us what she means.
But let’s back up! Because Janet Jackson, while undeniably a brilliant artist, isn’t the auteur or singer-songwriter type we’ve covered before. She grew up in the Jackson performing family under the management of her controlling father Joe Jackson. It was Joe who masterminded her first two solo albums, Janet Jackson and Dream Street. They weren’t bad projects, but they were intensely managed: focus-group-approved, musically inchoate, with no input from Janet herself. So she took the first in several industry-defining personal moves – divorced her husband, severed ties with Joe Jackson and the Jackson family industry to a much greater extent than her brother Michael had seven years earlier, hired her own producers and collaborators, and made a statement of independence.
Control, then, is a fantastically influential album. It writes its independence and artistic freedom directly into the text. Without this precedent, we wouldn’t have NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway, or P!nk’s M!ssundaztood, albums that broke their artists into pop royalty by emphasizing their independence from a stifling studio system and a change in sound. There’s an entire pop narrative invented by Ms. Jackson here. And it’s not the only way Control changed everything.
Because the album had a great sound that everyone wanted to copy as well. The producers and songwriters that Jackson hired were Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, founding members of The Time. You might also know The Time as the band that operated closely with Prince, who really forged the Minneapolis sound that sits deep within Control’s DNA. The album embodies that synthesized funk sound, where everything sounds like it’s reverberating in a small room made of aluminum. But it also pushes it forward by being more aggressive. These drum loops on these songs groove hard, bridging the gap between the digital pop style that Nile Rodgers had pioneered for Madonna in the early 80s and the New Jack Swing phenomenon that would emerge in the ‘90s.
In the middle of it all is Janet Jackson, who develops a unique personality with her lyrics that snaps all the musical elements together. In short, the thesis statement of Control is “I am a badass.” And she is! Listen to the opening salvo of “Control,” “Nasty,” and “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” one of the great one-two-three wallops in pop history, and try to deny that. But she’s a badass with enough range to express the most classic feelings of romance. By amplifying her independence, the moments when Janet Jackson years for love – as in “When I Think of You” or “He Doesn’t Even Know I’m Alive” – hit that much harder. After all, a song like “What Have You Done for Me Lately” can only come from someone who has an expectation of how to be properly treated. What kind of man could have the singer of “Nasty” swoon? One worthy of the song, undoubtedly.
Control has one final element that we won’t ever see again in Jackson’s albums: conciseness. Nine songs, with at most three ballads and no skits. Forty-two minutes. It’s a tight album with a palpable sense of discipline (or, dare I say it, control), and that makes it super-easy to listen to. But the inventa opus tends to be contrite – the first steps in one’s own space, the first words with one’s own voice, are an exploration. Does that work against the intended message of Control? A little bit, but the thrill of listening to a pop album with no filler electrifies me. Jackson would expand and lounge in her corner a lot more in the future, but her first steps into that corner have a charm all their own.
The Peak:
In the move from a tight, controlled statement to a sprawling, self-assured one, artists often lose something. Mostly consistency. A CD-straining, 70-minute magnum opus tackling themes of racial injustice, inequality, brutality? I think I know how this goes. It’s going to contain several world-beating songs that are worthy of the highest accolades, and then a pile of slush that everyone will ignore but nonetheless makes it a less-than-ideal listening experience. Case closed.
Except, no, it’s not. Rhythm Nation 1814 pulls off the impossible and manages to successfully give us more of everything that we loved about Control: more songs, more variety, more experimentation, more consistency. And it’s not even like an expansion of Control, because Rhythm Nation 1814 has its own identity. Rather than focus on Jackson herself, she’s rejecting the systems of inequality that arise in the world and arguing for education, enlightenment, and furious, righteous love as a balm to it all.
It was one of the best-selling and most successful albums in the world, charting hit after hit. Today, though, it’s been buried a bit. You’ll rarely see it even among poptimism-friendly publications as one of the greatest albums of the decade, even though it self-evidently is. Listening to it for the first time for this blog, I couldn’t help but hold my head in my hands as the hits, with immaculate consistency, kept coming. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I implore you to.
The Comedown:
In yet another moment of defying expectations, Janet. was such a monster success that it feels disingenuous to call it a comedown. It logged six singles on the Billboard Hot 100, a staggering feat which only pales in comparison compared to even more staggering success Rhythm Nation 1814, which scored seven (this makes it the all-time record-holder in that category). Arguably it’s not even the beginning of a downward slope, because the album after this one, The Velvet Rope, is hailed by many (usually fellow musicians) as her artistic masterpiece. But we must place the magnum opus somewhere, after all.
Rhythm Nation 1814 may have been thematically a departure from Control, but musically it was similar: industrial drumbeats, thick bass, pinging synths. By 1993 the innovations of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis had filtered out into other mainstream pop acts; the New Jack was in full Swing. Accordingly, Janet. abandons the industrial drum sounds of Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 in favor of a more sumptuous, clean sound driven by hip-hop breakbeats. But that wasn’t the only thing that affected the sound of this album.
Jackson had just signed an enormous record deal with Virgin for $40 million, a record high that was soon broken by her brother Michael’s signing to Sony. After being at the forefront of pop innovation in the 80s, the Jacksons were entering their imperial phase. But people thought that Janet Jackson’s fame was primarily due to her family associations and the production/songwriting work of Jam & Lewis, despite her active hand in the songwriting and direction of her own music.
The result was that Jackson was more involved on the ground-level music-making on Janet. She wrote all her own lyrics, and co-wrote and co-produced all the songs. This variety really shows when you listen to the album; keep in mind that the first song that Jackson had sole writing credit for was “Black Cat” on Rhythm Nation 1814, a kickass genre exercise into hard rock/heavy metal. Jackson was, and is, a fearless and eclectic music fan who loves to cross genre lines.
The headstrong innovation on Janet. is best exemplified by the run of songs in the middle beginning with “If”. To start with, “If” is an eye-poppingly dense song, incorporating screaming electric guitar and meticulous acoustic guitar, dramatic strings, thumping bass, a hip-hop breakbeat, and then a sample of the Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together” just for good measure. The intoxicating concoction means that Jackson can basically make the song all-chorus and get away with it, stretching the groove to ecstatic heights. Then we have “This Time,” my personal favorite song on the album and a strong contender for favorite Janet Jackson song period, an epic dance-floor stunner that Jackson sings through gritted teeth before dropping out in the bridge for… an opera interlude. It’s a flabbergasting choice, unimaginable on any other personality-centric pop album, but by the time the drumbeat comes back in and Jackson goes all out for the final chorus, and all the disparate elements congeal into a fist-pumping whole.
Afterward, “Throb” marginalizes Jackson’s voice even more – it’s a house song through-and-through, all the emphasis being placed on the production and beat with only occasional vocal contributions from Jackson herself. “What’ll I Do” is a 70s soul throwback of the kind that Sam Cooke would tear through. “Funky Big Band,” as its title suggests, brings back the 80s bass sound that was so prevalent on Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 in service of a funk stomper. And our dizzying run ends with “New Agenda,” a tune that veers a bit more towards the mean of the album in terms of sound but brings in Chuck D to pay some respect towards hip-hop, and he sounds galvanized to be in the presence of a social provocateur as visionary as him. These six songs communicate the musical landscape of 1993 as well as anything can: they embody the New Jack Swing sound that Jackson had helped pioneer, and seamlessly intertwine many other genres, both in-style (house, hip-hop, rock) and out-of-style (funk, soul, opera).
But there’s a complaint I have to lodge against Janet. It’s just trying so hard that it loses consistency, a trap that Jackson had so nimbly avoided on Rhythm Nation 1814. That run of songs in the middle is stunning, but the album gets off to too safe a start and by the end hits on a stretch of love ballads that become hard to tell apart. Nothing here is bad, because the contributing artists are operating on a rarefied level of craft, but you feel the length on Janet. in a way you didn’t on the album before it.
Nevertheless, if her goal was the prove her independence and standing as a musical artist in her own right: mission accomplished. From now on, Janet Jackson was Janet. No qualifiers needed. Nobody else capable of competing.
The Verdict:
I took a few days to simmer over this one! Control is tight, rigid and asskicking, while Janet. is intermittently transcendent. If the two albums were closer in length – say, if the former album were longer or the latter were shorter – I would go with Janet., but as a pure listening experience I’d be more eager to throw on the entirety of Control once more. This week, we go with the come-up album.
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