Feedback

Back in 86’s I watched this determined woman singing like a free spirit in what seemed to be a big hall full of chaotic, artistic, and messed up room. She was defiant, upset maybe, and her rude, yet so feminine movements made a kid like me, 10 years old by then, get madly in love with her.

Years after, I discovered the same girl I saw in that video, is the lovely “Charlene”, the amusing girl I fell in love with in my kindergarten days, from the T.V. series “Different Strokes”. Later on, when I was fourteen, the same girl provoked me when I watched her: she was everything I was looking for in those days when I needed to stress identity: she defended her race, her genre, her legacy, and without having to show more skin than her face and hands. It was a nice slant of sexiness when I watched her in “Love Will Never Do (without you)”.

According to her statements, she was betting her life to be taken seriously. And she wanted to prove it by bringing out subjects like the values of education, denouncing racism, violence, and she even directed the whole message delivered in what they called industrial music, a bit of a risky step to take by then, specially for a woman be cause it implied to detach a bit from the ‘soft’ style associated with the genre. Not even Madonna had made that.

Yes, am speaking about the Janet Jackson I fell in love with. The one that was in “Control” and made me loose it with ther tunes. The one that asked us in her song “Things are getting worse, we’ve got to make them better, its time to give a damn, lets work together”. The formula worked out and she signed by then one of the biggest contacts to a music label with Virgin Records (master’s ownership included).

For the next album, she blossomed in the most attractive looks I’ve seen on her (and am telling you I already had a serious crash), with “janet.”. But songs like “Throb” and “Any time, any place”, and the cover itself made me catch she thought that “the time to give a damn” was fading…

Then I got a bit of hope with “The Velvet Rope”. And yes, she was a bit rougher in her lyrics, and much more explicit on her lyrics, exploring subjects like bondage, fetish and threesomes (don’t tell me that I was the only one who got that the Rod Steward’s rendition is sung with that feeling). But there were songs that had a brain to it, like “you”, “what about” or “special”. It was about dealing with life, coping our skeletons in the closet, and the domestic violence.

Then she got divorced and pranks it to the whole world. She was thinking her hit was about ‘baby making songs’ with the “All for you” album, as she speaks, and she even puked things that she believed were sexy when she said ‘I didn’t even get the cum’. Joint with the Superbowl “Nipplegate”, Janet sung about ‘playing with her strawberry’, ‘or I feel you get erect’ in the embarrassingly to mention “Damita Jo” album. Then another album dropped with the same confusion between sexiness and cheap vulgarity in “20 Y.O”. As she speaks in the beginning of her record, “I’ve covered a lot in my 20 years, and I’ve uncovered a lot in my 20 years”.
Last month, again on her career, a ‘leak’ in the internet provides the next single: “Feedback”, taken from the forthcoming new release “Discipline”. Nice beat, great vocals, but I found disturbing, raw, and stupid the phrase “My swag is serious, something heavy like the first day period”. Following the request of your song… you want my feedback? You got it:

It’s supposed to be a new chance. You left your musical parents, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and seem to focus on your new contacts: and let me tell you Dupri seems to start following the path of P. Doo-Doo, a predictable path of bombs lacking flavor and freshness that we might have concomitantly seen in the rhythm and blues bastardized ‘hops’.



And now you come with a cover that recall me an erotized cover of “Somewhere In Time” by Iron Maiden, pointing in red the ‘fuel’ hole. By the distortion of her voice in the song, no wonder if the video mixes up the robotic and erotic concepts (maybe she’s looking for a black and wicked version of “All is full of love”). So: where is your innovation? Where is your brain? Do you have any now? Do you think that there might be something besides lust in the themes of your catalogue? How different from the rest are you really being? Do you really think the dildo-album concept is going to work again, right after you noticed in “All for you”, “Damita Jo” and “20 years old” we are a bit fed of that as a market?

Shame on you Janet, you chase the success by telling the world how nasty you are, just by now, when your age, years on the market, and the laws of gravity that the surgeon’s knife might delay but never stop quite, you start believing you need to sell your skin and nastiness instead of your voice. The only market you seem to keep, which is my generation, is going bye bye. In what has to do with me, I stick to when you really were good. Am listening “Rhythm Nation 1814”. Maybe you should learn from your old you how to innovate. That would be a nice discipline.