A must for any Janet Jackson fan, 80’s music devotee and dance music aficionado, Number Ones explores the evolution of dance music and a woman from Control’s timid girl asking her date “Let’s Wait a While”, to raunchy sex vamp asking her date to “strum me like a guitar, blow out my amplifier” on 2008’s “Feedback”, her last traipse into the top 40.
Loaded with hits, Number Ones practically merges her first three successful albums, with the bulk of the hits coming from her late 80’s and early 90’s successes, leaving little room for her less artistically challenging and successful work in the 2000’s.
Under a new deal between Universal Music Enterprises and EMI Music, all of Jackson’s best known tracks, including collaborations with Herb Alpert on 1986’s “Diamonds”, “The Best Things in Life are Free” with Luther Vandross, a new single “Make Me”, and all of her chart topping releases up to 2008’s Discipline are included for the first time ever on one collection.
Janet Jackson Takes Control
It couldn’t have been easy for Janet Jackon growing up. As the youngest sister in a family of superstars, she would constantly draw comparisons to Michael and Jermain, the talentless Latoya and live under controlling thumb of father Joe.
When Janet decided to work in the entertainment business, she first started out as an actress scoring bit parts in NBC sitcom Different Strokes and the TV series Fame. But neither of them brought her any.
Turning to music, she recorded two albums that went down in history as commercial flops. Barely out of her teens, her future career seemed bleak and destined to follow the same path as her older sister who rode the coattails of her famous family writing tell-all trash and becoming fodder for supermarket tabloids.
Meanwhile, in the early 80’s a pair of high school students, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, formed The Time with Morris Day as lead singer and began to tour with Prince as his opening act. Prince later fired the band but the duo continued to write and produce for other successful R&B artists such as Cherrelle and Alexander O'Neal before being introduced to Janet Jackson.
Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis
Teaming up to culminate Janet’s glass cutting lyrics with the blazing Jam/Lewis sound characterized by a fusion of funk, disco and R&B, punctuated by heavily synthesized percussion, danceable beats and heavy moaning, the resulting album, Control, not only established the trio as a contemporary musical force, but it became one of the definitive albums of the decade.
Control, a short nine-song album, generated no less than six top ten singles on the Billboard charts, establishing Janet as an artist in her own right and allowed her to leap out of Michael’s shadow. The follow up album, Rhythm Nation 1814, a call to unification on the dancefloor, was even more successful. By the end of the 1980’s Janet Jackson was as much a star as her brother, Madonna and Prince.
Janet’s Overt Sexuality
In 1991, Jackson signed a record-breaking, multi-million dollar recording contract with Virgin Records, making her one of the wealthiest singers in the business, surpassing even her aforementioned contemporaries. Her third successful album (and fifth over all) simply called janet, bore witness to her transformation from timid young girl to full blown sex kitten, causing the first of many scandals by appearing topless on the album cover and Rolling Stone magazine.
Tracks such as “That's the Way Love Goes”, “If”, “Because of Love”, “You Want This”, and “Any Time, Any Place”, shattered any illusions the public still held that Janet remained a little girl. Filled with sexual desires and adult fantasies, Janet broke boundaries but still managed to channel her desires into chart-topping hits, a feat she would try to replicate on subsequent albums in the 2000’s with waning public interest and chart success.
Throughout the 1990’s Janet’s star rose higher. She starred in critically acclaimed feature films, recorded with top rappers as well as her brother Michael, continued to rack up chart hits, Grammy awards and released her first collection of greatest hits.
Janet’s Velvet Rope
The Velvet Rope appeared in 1997, following a bout with depression. Though still highly danceable, the album tackled darker lyrics full of introspection. Flirting with gay themes, she contributed much of the proceeds from hit “Together Again” to American Foundation for AIDS Research and gave a sapphist interpretation to Rod Stewart's “Tonight's the Night”. By the end of the decade, Billboard named her the second most successful artist of the decade.
Though Janet Jackson continued to record albums throughout the 2000’s, the magic had all but dried up. Janet Jackson Number Ones captures all of Janet Jackson’s hits and plays them in chronological order, further evidence of her 80’s and 90’s golden period with the bulk of the songs coming from albums released between 1986 and 1997.
With this new collection, longtime fans as well as casual listeners have the chance to own each of her successful singles for the first time in one place.
Janet Jackson Number Ones is available now.
James W. Coates - A nomad at heart, James W. Coates has been combining his passion for music, writing and traveling ever since his father packed the family ...
