Janet Jackson. (Arts & Entertainment Networks, Associated Entertainment Corporation, Lifetime, 2022(

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I settled in at 6 p.m. to watch all four hour-long segments Lifetime and the Arts & Entertainment channel co-produced on the life of Janet Jackson. Janet Jackson’s name has been off the cultural radar screen for decades now, even though a lot of the baby divas out there regard her as a major influence and Janet finally got admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, over a decade after she first became eligible. As a much younger man in the late 1980’s, I enjoyed the Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 albums as well as anybody, and at least had some dim awareness that they were a sort of declaration of independence from the all-encompassing management contract of their father, Joe Jackson. The show went back all the way to the Jackson family saga’s beginnings in the steel town of Gary, Indiana, though Janet, the youngest of nine children, was only four years old when Joe Jackson and his wife Katherine moved from Gary to Los Angeles and therefore he has virtually no living memories of their existence there. In the show she’s taken back to the Jackson family home in Gary, where she’s struck by how small it was and recalled how she and two of her brothers had to sleep on the same living-room couch. (The Jacisons had their nine kids in the same sequence of three: boy-boy-girl, boy-boy-girl, boy-boy-girl.) The first hour deals with the discipline and work ethic Joe Jackson had instilled in his children and the musical talent he nurtured in them to keep them out of gangs and off of drugs, and Tito Jackson recalled how he was practicing on dad’s guitar one day when he broke a string. Dad was about to wallop him when one of Tito’s brothers pointed out to him that Tito now played better than dad ever had and he should listen to him.

Of course no telling of any tale relating to the Jacksons can avoid mentioning the tragedy of the most gifted and most controversial Jackson, Michael, whose early home videos taken well before the family turned professional (when Michael was only 10) reveal him already to be a polished performer, looking for all the world like a miniature James Brown. One can’t help but watch that kid, wearing the beehive Afro while performing his heart out, and not feel sad because we already know how the story ended. I used to joke, “Nostalgia means being able to remember when Saturday Night Live was still funny and Michael Jackson was still Black,” and the biggest laugh I ever got from that line came from a woman who was Black herself. There’s even an ironic reference to Michael Jackson in the film Three Kings, in which the Iraqi torturing Mark Wahlberg’s character asked him about Michael Jackson and the horrible racism in America that had led him to do those bizarre treatments to his face. “Actually, he did that to himself,” said Wahlberg’s character – and the Iraqi doesn’t believe him.

The Janet Jackson documentary shows the explosive success of the Jackson 5 and how it transformed the family’s lifestyle. All of a sudden they were living in a big house in Encino with a swimming pool and they were hosting parties at which celebrities were frequent guests. Janet recalled being especially fascinated by Elizabeth Taylor and the sheer immobility of her massive head of hair. Eventually the Jackson 5 fired their father as manager, and so he negotiated a recording deal for his youngest daughter Janet with A&M and maintained a tight level of control over her first two albums, from choosing the material to picking the cover photos. (Janet recalls the cover of her first album being a picture she particularly hated, but dad picked the photo and his word was law.) When Janet, too, fired her dad as manager and took control of her own career, no doubt there was an air of “Et tu, Bruté” about it: the film revealed that the moment Janet fired him, Joe Jackson closed up his office and went out of the management business instead of having to recruit new talent outside his family and taking an I’ll-show-them attitude towards the whole thing.

Janet Jackson sought out and got the hottest production team in Black music – Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis of Morris Day and The Time, who had made a name for themselves as Prince’s opening act – and hired them to work on her new album even though she nad to go to Minneapolis to work on it. To make sure we all got the point, she called the album Control and wrote a title song that was an anthem to her new-found artistic independence, Both this album and the follow-up, Rhythm Nation 1814, sold exceptionally well. Janet decided to do a worldwide tour after she saw brother Michael performing at London’s giant Wembley Stadium to promote his album Bad. She put together a show with a troupe of dancers and a choreographer – reminiscent of the way her brother Michael and Madonna between them revolutionized audience expectations of what a pop-music concert would be. No longer could a singer just stand front and center on the stage and belt out song after song: reflecting the rise of music videos and how they revolutionized the audience’s expectations of what a live show would look like, the concerts of the future would be elaborate productions in which the star singer would have to work out to be fit enough to perform and a whole battery of dancers and associate performers would have to be brought on the tour to rehearse separately and then perform together. (One of the saddest things about Michael Jackson’s last film, the documentary This Is It which shows rehearsal footage for the 50 shows at London’s O2 arena which he didn’t live long enough to give, was his awareness that he was going to have to get himself together in his late 40’s to duplicate moves he’d done in videos in his 20’s with the benefit of retakes if he screwed up.)

The Janet Jackson documentary also includes segments on her absolutely wretched choices of men: her first husband, James DeBarge, he admits she married more to get out from under her dad’s control, and she was only with him for a year until she was able to have it annulled. The show included one of the most bizarre rumors to circulate around the Jackson family: the idea that she and DeBarge had had a baby whom Janet had given to one of her two older sisters to raise, despite footage showing that during her year with DeBarge she had made regular public appearances and surely someone would have noticed if she were pregnant. (That sounds to me like the plot of Bellini’s opera Norma, in which we were supposed to believe that the high priestess of Druid England has had an affair with the Roman general and had two kids by him despite her having to make a public appearance every month at the time of the full moon without anyone noticing.) The documentary doesn’t mention an even weirder rumor that Michael and Janet Jackson were actually the same person – though the rumor gained so much traction Michael actually brought Janet on an awards show just to prove they were different people.

The show deals with her signing with Richard Branson’s Virgin label after her contract with A&M expired following the release of Rhythm Nation, and her first appearance with Branson at the launch of one of his hot-air balloons. (Ah, for the days when mega-billionaires were content with hot-air balloons instead of building rockets and firing themselves into space!) The show ends with Janet ruefully comments that her public support of Michael when he was put on trial for pedophilia made her seem “guilty by association” even though she knew her brother well enough to be sure he would never have committed such a crime. (Michael Jackson was acquitted on all charges, but over a decade later – well after the statute of limitations for perjury had expired – two of the young men who had testified for Michael now said they had lied under oath and Michael had actually molested them. Their excuse was essentially the Michael Cohen defense – they had literally been star-struck and had wanted to protect their celebrity friend – but at least Michael Cohen took responsibility for his actions and pleaded guilty of perjury instead of waiting until he was beyond the statute of limitations. If it sounds like I’m blaming the victims, so be it: trials are supposed to settle claims like this once and for all and people who lie under oath screw that up.)

Janet recalled the time she worked with Michael on the song “Scream” and the accompanying video, which cost $7 million to make at a time when you could still make a major feature film for that amount, and she recalled Michael as being more withdrawn and harder to get along with than the version she’d grown up with – though the last time they ever spoke, about a month before his death, they ended their conversation with mutual “I love you”’s. The show also mentioned Janet’s later relationships with men, including her second husband, René Elizondo, who was such a control freak people who saw them together wondered how a woman who had recorded a song called “Control” would let a man walk over her like this. After the breakup she briefly dated a music producer from Atlanta named Jermaine Petri, but she broke up with him over their conflicting schedules and the sheer number of women who threw themselves at him because he was dating Janet Jackson. The show also covers the controversy over her decision at age 50 to get pregnant and have a child – though they didn’t mention who the father was and they didn’t actually show the baby on screen (no surprise there!).

The dominant story in the show’s fourth one-hour episode was the fooforaw over her baring her breast during her performance in the halftime show at the 2004 Super Bowl, including one member of her entourage who said, “It’s a nipple. Get over it.” There were the usual self-proclaimed moralists who got on their little social soapboxes and demanded action, including threatening to sue every CBS station that had carried the program, which would have cost the network millions. The controversy eventually died down, but not without taking a toll on Janet Jackson’s career: MTV and VH-1 banned playing her new album and after her previous singles had charted at number one, the new one only made it to #2. (That’s still a sales figure a lot of other artists would die for!) The show ended with Janet Jackson ready for rehearsals for a new worldwide concert tour in 2020 – the worst possible time she had planned for one due to the COVID-19 pandemic – but Janet Jackson is still a survivor (she’s outlived Michael by several years now and had a measure of stability in her life that sadly eluded him) and it’s clear we haven’t seen or heard the last of her.