![]() The 90’s haven’t been a banner decade for the two producers. Jackson, on the other hand, has, with her decade-long association with Jam & Lewis forged one of the most creatively rewarding alliances in the history of popular music. The records share similar thematic preoccupations, but Madonna had off-loaded her most sympathetic collaborator, Patrick Leonard, by that point and Erotica ‘s hooks rarely matched its shocks. Of course, it may seem like she’s got Madonna’s Erotica album on her mind. No wonder she hangs her newly hennaed head of corkscrew curls on the cover. (On “You,” she points an accusing finger at an intimate who has “learned to survive in your fictitious world.” Educated guess: It ain’t Tito!) But now she also wants to be tied up, to get down and, ultimately, to find love. She still wants to be in control, she still wants respect, and she still has family issues. Sweetness and lust coiled around each other on “That’s the Way Love Goes,” “The Body That Loves You,” “Throb” and “Any Time Any Place.” The Velvet Rope is the Janet of all these albums. Despite lyrics and videos that depicted her as some funky clubland Gestapo figure who saved blameless urchins from the blood-soaked streets, she breathed rapturous life into some of her most exhilarating material, songs like “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” “Escapade” and “Come Back to Me.” Janet, in 1993, was an extended exploration of the singer’s sexuality. Rhythm Nation 1814 in 1989, was a conceptual misstep that saw Janet sup too thirstily from brother Michael’s messiah mug. She took no quarter from her family, gave her slack-ass boyfriend his marching orders and haughtily informed the roughnecks of the world that her first name wasn’t baby, it was Janet-Miss Jackson, if you were nasty. Once a chirpy cipher, Janet was suddenly the voice of all good little girls straining at the leash. Control was a perfect slice of sassy, thumping mid-80’s pop. And on that surface they painted a masterpiece. Famed for their practice of delving deep into an artist’s personality to fashion their music, Messrs. That Janet Jackson disappeared in 1986 after a trip to Minneapolis for the purposes of meeting writer-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Aimless, chubby-cheeked, seemingly talent-free and determinedly trading off the family name, she made dead-duck albums like Dream Street and fleshed out the casts of Good Times and Fame. ![]() At first listen, this isn’t the work of the Janet Jackson who 11 years earlier whispered “Let’s Wait Awhile.” But, actually, that’s exactly what it is. Jackson addresses her masturbatory dream-life (“My Need”), her enthusiasm for bondage (“Rope Burn”), her unwillingness to be shackled by the parameters of gender (“Free Xone” and a re-reading of Rod Stewart’s 1976 hit “Tonight’s the Night” as an invitation to a threesome), and her desire to cruise a club, snag a stud, drag him home and do him (“Go Deep”). ![]() In the course of the album’s 75-minute run, Ms. “What About” is The Velvet Rope ‘s most emotionally abandoned selection, but it certainly isn’t any kind of anomaly in terms of its uncosmeticized openness. “What about the times you hit my face, what about the times you kept on when I said no more, please,” she snarls on “What About,” continuing, “What about the times you said you didn’t fuck her, she only gave you head?” Jackson, who has never fought shy of dipping an exploratory toe into the pool of full disclosure, is, through the duration of The Velvet Rope, in it up to her neck. Carey’s album has been applauded for the modicum of candor that permeates its lyrical content. Whisking the old rogue away from the brink of penury isn’t the only thing the two records have in common. Samples of songs with which he was at best tenuously involved give him composition credits on Mariah Carey’s Butterfly and Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (Virgin). After almost a decade of stillborn projects, he suddenly owns pieces of the music publishing rights on two American No. It’s been a good month for Malcolm McLaren.
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