1993: Janet Jackson, Janet
By Aricka Foreman
On weekends, my mom would drive us to my grandparents mostly Black suburb, Inkster, MI. We’d sing along to 92.3’s mix of current R&B and throwback classics, watching the landscape change along the highway. I looked forward to the weekend: visits with non-school friends, cousins and uncles. Most importantly, my grandparents had cable which meant I could watch MTV and BET.
I enjoyed spending time with my outside-of-school friends. But my grandparents had cable and an on the floor-model television that made everyone on its screen larger than life. I was a shy kid. Scrawny and quiet, 1993 MTV gave me opportunities to try on different personas outside of the books I loved. Besides, my grandfather was a retired-before-he-even-got-started singer. Music appreciation runs deep in my family. My mom and uncle’s music collections were living archives, testaments to the times we were living.
“That’s The Way Love Goes” would leave an indelible impression on how I chose my fleeting crushes, but “You Want This” felt fun and flirtatious. It let me know both were possible, especially when no one else was watching. I could flirt with myself and move my gangly body, be delighted in my sweet embarrassment until it was no longer a twitch. Aware of the male gaze too soon, I had to carve out rooms where I was free. Undoing the male gaze is a perpetual evolution. In many ways Janet taught me about desire, and that the journey of feeling safe in it was mine to make. And it troubled neat definitions of desire: heteronormative relationships, the unfilling quest to find “the one”. If only to resist her sweet-melody-notions. Gave me the chance to consider that what I wanted was important and crucial to envisioning a different world where make a home for myself without apology.
The way music shapes my poetics I attribute to sampling. How contemporary songs bridge themselves to our predecessor’s experiences. It’s how we build and pass on traditions and legacies. Less than a third of the way through, I realized “You Want This” uses a sample from The Supremes “Love Child,” whose uptempo orchestra energy almost always made me jump out of my seat. Grown folks would follow suit. Multi-generational juke. The bond was our special language, our way of bridging the gap. Wide-mouthed, all teeth and joy. Time suspended, easy.
If you want my future, then/ you better work it boy/ No it won’t come easy, no/ I know you want this
These are the lessons I’d collect, sitting quietly in the backseat. In earshot of grown folks talk while they played backgammon under the moonlight as bats dipped overhead after holiday barbecues. An assumed knowing. Like how many eggs to put in the baked macaroni and cheese: it differs, based on who said what and when and how.
Since so little is without context, the multiple mediums I encountered Janet, two things became clear: 1) this was her first truly independent album after Rhythm Nation, and 2) this solo album rode alongside her acting debut in Poetic Justice. Yall. Poetic Justice Janet, Maya Angelou’s poems, Regina King’s smart-mouthed fight is how I knew I would write poems. Janet Jackson’s career is a case study for how we might live inside our perpetual evolutions--constantly becoming. Another lesson I’d hold close. There was little I could separate between PJ Janet and the songs on Janet. I had a model for what cohesive storytelling as practice looked like. To do, make, change and reapproach.
If I think about storytelling, Janet was the earliest album that introduced me to interludes after every song, breaking up the pace to set (or reset) the stage for what was next to come. The move exemplified breath and pause as a means to enter and hold narrative fully, vulnerably. We must prepare ourselves. This gesture is a high-key tenor for what it means to push us to pay attention to intimacy. Not just the normalized romantic framework we’re taught is the only place real intimacy exists: Janet told me I didn't have to hold that in order to be whole. Accept that. So I didn't.
Can we talk about “If” and what doorway the conjunction grants? If?? For a Black girl cementing herself possible and what her blooming-music might sound like? Doctrines aren’t suggestive, they’re prescriptive.I didn’t know yet that I didn’t have to choose. “If” like “This Time” was my cognitive understanding that Black womanhood shaped everything. Gospel, jazz and blues felt like ours in my house, but Janet made me recognize we’re not merely architects but alchemists of rock and metal; that we have had a steady hand in funk and folk music, and that there wasn’t any style of being we aren’t in dialogue with, adopt as our own. It wasn’t the sexual aesthetic of “If”, but the dexterity Janet seemed to fluidly employ. She embraced witness and voyeurism, controlling how any gaze mattered to her, and when it didn’t at all.
She traveled anywhere, couldn't I. She didn’t have to change herself, her plush vest with horizontal-sharp stone lapel and sleek-lined pants, her decorative choker (I had one, it broke, I’m still desperately in search of a replacement). We could be ourselves no matter where we were. And where meant however vast our imaginations would make room.
Janet’s range from “What I’ll Do” to “Big Funky Band,” let me know if I embraced my intrigue, nothing was off limits. I’ve joked with friends about Janet’s whisper-singing; seemingly inaudible. But her style makes us tune our ears to that space where lyric and music breathe. I ask myself, inaudible to whom? The question becomes a challenge: if you aren’t listening, come closer. A gesture of a femme poetics, an act of critical tenderness.
Was Janet the first to let me know investing in my own emotional knowledge and intuition was THE way forward? More than likely. She wouldn’t be the only. I’d have Minnie, Stephanie, always Diana. Aaliyah too.
I remember stolen moments I leaned into myself. Grateful for my own embrace. Janet said do what I want. I tried. I failed. I did. I do.
Aricka Foreman is an American poet and interdisciplinary writer from Detroit MI. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber, and Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books), she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Offing, and spends her time in Chicago, IL engaging poetry with photography & video.