Day 170: Janet Jackson – Control
Today’s album is another one of my attempts to plug up a big fat hole in my music history knowledge and listen to a classic album I’ve never gotten around to. So many pop singers cite Janet Jackson as an influence, with artists like Britney, Beyoncé, Kylie Minogue and JADE saying she has impacted their work, so I thought I should explore some of her stuff. I went for her 1986 release Control, as it very recently celebrated its 40th anniversary.
Album cover courtesy of A&M Records
Janet Jackson is the youngest of the ten kids in the Jackson family who didn’t think she’d become a singer. She’d been acting in some sitcoms but her father arranged for her to get a record deal with A&M. Control was her fourth album, but it was the first one she released after she separated from her family business and went out on her own, making the kind of music that she wanted to. It became her first album to top the Billboard 200.
She doesn’t mince her words on what she’s doing on the album: the opening song “Control” starts with a spoken word intro where she says “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,” singing that when she was younger she let her other people control her, but now she’s finally free. This applied to her parents, especially her notoriously strict father Joe Jackson, but she was also free from a marriage with a drug addict who she’d married when she was 18.
Control is largely autobiographical, and it chronicles how she was navigating life without parental control and a controlling marriage, but it’s also more widely about how she was coming to term with being on her own for the first time in her life and having to become empowered to survive on her own:
The danger hit home when a couple of guys started stalking me on the street. They were emotionally abusive. Sexually threatening. Instead of running to Jimmy or Terry for protection, I took a stand. I backed them down. That's how songs like 'Nasty' and 'What Have You Done for Me Lately' were born, out of a sense of self-defense. Control meant not only taking care of myself but living in a much less protected world. And doing that meant growing a tough skin.
I listened to it the first time just as a background album while I was doing something else and while I thought it was a good album, maybe an 8, I was sort of disappointed. I’d seen that it was number 42 on Apple Music’s list of the best albums ever created, so expectations were very high, and it did fall short of the mark. But then I read about the album and put it on for a second time, paying a bit more attention to the lyrics, I was more sold. Then I watched a few music videos.
I can’t say anything about this that no one hasn’t said yet, but holy moly, that woman is a PERFORMER. I saw that Jennifer Lopez said she decided to go into the entertainment industry because she saw the video for “Pleasure Principle” and I can see why – I’m far too unsexy to even want to become a pop star, but I can see how it would inspire some of the less aesthetically challenged people to want to follow in her footsteps. What a presence. The songs really come alive when you see her dancing to them.
Originally I thought “kind of like Michael but worse,” but I’m now fully a convert. It was a bit of a slow burner, but I got there, I’ll pop this on when I need a little lift. It’s a 9/10, I can see myself listening to this a fair bit actually.