‘I think I am breaking the pattern’: Janet Jackson on bad relationships, new music and Kamala Harris
Janet Jackson has a cold. It is the hottest day of the year in London; outside, the tarmac is melting and the tube is operating as a sauna, but when I catch a first glimpse of her – buttoned up and cinched into black wool Thom Browne tuxedo pants and blazer over box-fresh platform sneakers – she looks perfectly serene, untouched by civilian inconveniences such as weather, the passing of time – or even a case of the sniffles.
I’m guided into a windowless room at the Peninsula hotel, and ask a member of the PR team about which of the two club chairs to take. I’m reassured that “the good thing about Janet is that she really doesn’t have a ‘side’. She honestly has no preference.” In superstar terms, this is meant to code Jackson as refreshingly low-key. But then, of course, she walks through the door, braids loose, posture taut. Hand sanitiser is swiftly pumped into her open palms by an assistant as Jackson apologises for being unwell. She turns to me to dispense a firm handshake and an undeniably dazzling smile. She is every bit as starry as I’d hoped: charming, expensive-smelling, comfortable being fussed over in a way only a lifetime of fame will do for you.
“This is just me, loving what I do,” she says softly, as we make small talk about her forthcoming live shows, her first full tour in Europe since 2011. So softly, in fact, that I move my recorder to rest on the arm of her chair. “Loving what I do and being grateful that God has allowed me to do what I enjoy and for people to still be interested. I’m very thankful.” (We’re speaking a few weeks before the sudden death of her brother Tito.) Jackson has a knack for drifting into grateful platitudes, partly, I think, because she’s determined to appear humble, but partly as a guardrail against any kind of controversy. After five decades in the public eye, it’s easier to be bland than to be burned; Jackson has plenty of experience of the latter.
In a parallel universe, one where she didn’t grow up in music’s first family, the youngest of the nine Jackson siblings, or one where her career hadn’t been torpedoed by “nipplegate” 20 years ago, Janet Jackson would be considered one of music’s greatest artists. For fans, her output and influence puts her in conversation with Prince, David Bowie, Beyoncé. Not just for her imperial run – from Control in 1986 to The Velvet Rope in 1997 – but for the record-breaking firsts she stacked up along the way: most top five singles from one album (seven for Rhythm Nation 1814); the most successful debut tour ever (in 1990); and, at the time, signing the most lucrative recording contract in music history ($80m in 1996), surpassing even her brother Michael.
Britney Spears and Janelle Monáe both claim Jackson as their biggest inspiration, and Charli xcx released a whole album (Crash, in 2022) in homage to her. Kendrick Lamar has paid direct tribute to her in his work, Kanye West has sampled and produced her. Pop’s beloved “good girl gone bad” trope – since mined by Rihanna and Miley Cyrus – was pretty much invented by Jackson. The moody, glitchy R&B of the last decade, perfected by everyone from Frank Ocean and Kelela, to Solange Knowles and Tinashe, has her at the root.
Yet Jackson is serially underestimated. There is a reluctance to acknowledge her contribution to the American songbook, a remarkably belated induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, and a sense of being permanently seen as the little sister to the most famous entertainer who ever lived. Does she believe she gets the dues she deserves?
“You know what, I really don’t focus on that,” she says slowly, folding a tissue into ever tinier squares. “I do what I do because I love it. I get so much fulfilment from it, but not one award is in my house, nor has there ever been.” Where does she put her haul of platinum discs? “It sounds so bad, but they’re all in storage.” She shrugs. “Nothing in my house is to do with entertainment and me. No shot of me performing, none of that, just photographs of me with my baby and family … Mind you, growing up in my parents’ house with my brothers, all across the walls there were the gold albums. The platinum albums. The covers. Maybe that’s why? Not to rebel against it, just … I grew up with this. I don’t need to do this.”
Does she find it corny or embarrassing to celebrate her own success?
“I don’t find it corny. It’s not even embarrassment.” She pauses. “I just don’t need that to make me who I am. I don’t need to walk by and look at that every day and say, ‘You know what? I did that!’ That was my job,” she says, bluntly matter of fact. “And I loved it. I know I have five Grammys. I know there’s an Oscar nomination. I know I sold 180m records.”
Jackson is quiet but emphatic. She is promoting the second leg of her live tour Together Again, named after her 1997 single and, to date, her most streamed track on Spotify. It was her eighth No 1 in the US way back when, and became her bestselling single ever in the UK. It remains just about the most joyously up-tempo song about death you’ll hear.
This nostalgic nod to the 90s is entirely intentional. “I look back at all of it, but the 90s era and when I was a kid, that was the most fun. The whole 90s era, you never thought back then that it would come back around like this.” She smiles. “I just think it’s so awesome for me to be here and experience the kids wearing the low-rise pants again, all the looks.”
There is something full circle about where she is now. She tells me that one of the dancers she met during The Velvet Rope years, Gil Duldulao, is creative director of the current live tour. It’s a behemoth of a concert production that has so far grossed more than $50m and played to almost half a million fans. Jackson admits she keeps a tight inner circle. “It’s a family. Some of my people have been with me for 27, 30, 40 years.” She smiles. “Gil lied to me back then and told me he was 18 – he was just 16 years old when he started with me!” she says in mock horror. “We’re still close, he’s very talented.”
The Velvet Rope established Jackson’s raw, soul-searching era, chronicling her battle with depression and low self-esteem. She had moved from the sexually charged liberation of 1993’s Janet, all hard-bodied abs, endless interviews about her sex life and that bare-breasted Rolling Stone magazine cover, to singing songs about her pain. “There’s nothing more depressing than having everything and still feeling sad,” she famously claimed on the track Sad. It’s a surprise then, that she looks back so fondly on that decade.
She puts a similarly upbeat spin on childhood memories that, from the outside, seem a little dark. Jackson reminisces to me about the time she went to Studio 54 as a kid, just 10 or 11 years old, hanging with big brother Michael, surrounded by glamour and debauchery. Or of sneaking sips of wine at home with her sister La Toya, who was 10 years older. “She’d come in my room and say, ‘Here, Jan, have some wine with me’, and give me this much,” Jackson motions an inch, “because she didn’t want to drink wine by herself!”
This was the house where, growing up, Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin were known to pop by. Where David Bowie visited and offered her brothers a little of what he was having. Where the nine Jackson siblings worked at a relentless pace, ruled by their father’s violence. Janet was closest to Michael back then. In her 2011 book, True You, she talked about internalising his teasing about her weight and described her body dysmorphia as a child. She was open about her periods of intense self-loathing and of being traumatised by her father, Joe, who had her record her first two albums (Janet Jackson in 1982, Dream Street in 1984) under his strict direction.
It seems clear that Jackson has fought for control for most of her life, both in her career and her personal life, from Joe’s early push for her to become a pop star when she wanted to act or become a lawyer, to a relationship at 16, when she left home and eloped with her boyfriend James DeBarge, a drug addict who treated her badly.
At 19, Jackson finally wrested power away from her father, and decamped to Minneapolis with Prince’s old band members, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, to record what many fans consider her true first record, aptly titled Control. Four years later, in 1989, she reconjured that alchemy for Rhythm Nation 1814. The run of singles those albums delivered – When I Think of You, Escapade, Nasty, Miss You Much, What Have You Done for Me Lately – stood firm in her competition with Michael.
Nonetheless, she ceded ground again during her 11-year marriage to René Elizondo, another former dancer who ended up directing her videos, her looks and – according to her book – the way she saw herself. Jackson spent much of the first half of her career openly berating herself in interviews, believing she wasn’t good enough, for thinking she was too fat. She told reporters that she hated her smile, that it made her look like the Joker. I wonder if she is easier on herself now?
“I could still say not nice things about me to me, but in a joking way. It’s still not good to do, because whatever you say, your brain is hearing it. I look back and think, ‘Oh. I thought I looked like this’, but, actually, I wasn’t too bad?” Is that the best she can say about herself, that she – talented, beautiful, adored – wasn’t too bad? “I wasn’t too bad,” she repeats. “I wasn’t as heavy as I felt I was, and I shouldn’t have listened to those around me, I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself.”
It’s a lesson that has come, I suspect, partly from having suffered one of the worst public pile-ons in the history of the internet. Why beat yourself up so much when everyone else is doing it for you?
It has now been two decades since Jackson performed at the Super Bowl half-time show, two decades since America went into meltdown over the infamous “wardrobe malfunction”. To recap: Jackson performed alongside Justin Timberlake for a rendition of his hit Rock Your Body. At the song’s final line, “I’m gonna have you naked by the end of this song”, he ripped off a section of her PVC bodice to reveal Jackson’s naked breast and pierced nipple underneath. It was a fraction of a second – nine-sixteenths of a second, in fact – of footage deemed so offensive that the broadcaster, CBS, was fined half a million dollars for indecency and Jackson’s career nose-dived. If the outrage and opprobrium seemed preposterous at the time – the two were forced to publicly apologise and led news headlines and bulletins for days – it is beyond parody reading back through the cuttings today.
Her team warned me beforehand that Jackson won’t talk about The Incident, but it is impossible to ignore its impact on her legacy: “Janet Jackson” became the most searched term in internet history in 2004 and 2005. Her briefly exposed boob has been cited by the founders of YouTube for inspiring them to create the site – simply to allow people to gawk and share what happened. Damita Jo, the album she released that year, bombed. Jackson was shamed and vilified. Her artistry was trashed, rendering it a footnote to a mid-00s meme. (Timberlake’s career, it’s worth remembering, was unscathed, although in 2021 he apologised for having “benefited from a system that condones misogyny and racism”.)
What does she make of the idea, well documented by sleuthing podcasts and below-the-line comment culture, that she was culturally blacklisted in the aftermath?
She tilts her head. “Wait,” she says. “The cultural … ?”
Blacklisting?
“Uh-huh.” She coughs and looks uncomfortable.
Was it true? Or have her fans overplayed what happened?
“No,” she raises her brows. “It’s true.” She nods. “It is true.”
Leslie Moonves, then head of the CBS Corporation (who resigned in 2018 following a slew of allegations of sexual abuse and harassment against him, which he denies), is said to have personally orchestrated a blanket ban on TV and radio play of Janet Jackson songs. He waged a years-long vendetta against her, apparently led in part by his demand for a personal apology from Jackson and not getting one. The press, on the other hand, had a field day with a story that had it all: race, sex, celebrity, shock, and another Jackson scandalising middle America.
Does she think it had a negative affect on her career? “For sure, for sure.” She gently clears her throat, wanting to bring this line of questioning to a close. “Oh, for sure.”
Jackson’s subsequent albums failed to match her earlier highs in critical or commercial terms. In some respects, that’s the way it goes in the music industry, but the media mauling that Jackson suffered left a bitter mark. That, and the misfortune of being related to Michael and all that entails, I suggest, robbed Jackson of her rightful place in the cultural conversation.
“That’s very sweet,” she says neutrally. “But, like I said, I don’t think about it. I just do what I do and I enjoy what I do. And if they want to say this and that, and give me those accolades, the acclaim you say, then so be it. And if they don’t, then so be it.”
She may not want to publicly acknowledge it, but Jackson seems to have entered her era of legacy-building. In 2021, she cleared out her closets and raised more than $4m in an auction of more than 800 pieces that included everything from music video costumes to spanking crops to her childhood maths homework. Kim Kardashian paid $25,000 for one of Jackson’s outfits; a single hoop earring with a key on it sold for almost $44,000. A year later, Jackson sold her New York apartment of 25 years and released a four-part documentary about her life simply titled Janet Jackson. “It’s an era of legacy-building but it’s about release,” she concedes. “Because when you’re talking about all of this, it’s been me releasing the apartment, I’ve released through the auction, wanting to share those things, letting go.”
From the outside, the last few years have looked a little muddled. Tours have been promised before and have been left unfulfilled. An album – Black Diamond – was announced and then junked. “I feel so badly about that,” she says, sheepishly. There was this stuff I had to clean up in my own back yard, which got cleaned up,” she motions, deliberately vague. “And I have recorded a lot of music,” she laughs. “A lot of music that’s just sitting on the shelf.” Why isn’t she releasing it? “I went to my brother [Randy] … and I think, I think he’s just waiting for the opportune time.”
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I’m surprised that Randy, who is four years older than Janet and the youngest Jackson brother, has so much say over her career. They are partners in Rhythm Nation Records, but is he such a big part of her decision-making process? “I think he’s waiting – yeah, of course he’s a big part.” She playfully rolls her eyes. “He’s got a big head,” she says in a teasing sing-song. “A big muscle head.”
Jackson has been living quietly in London for most of the last eight years, a consequence of her third marriage, to – and divorce from – Wissam Al Mana, a Londoner with businesses in Qatar who is worth a reputed $1bn. The two split up weeks after their son, Eissa, was born in 2017 and now co-parent. London doesn’t seem a natural fit for someone who considers the blue skies and permanent sunshine of Los Angeles home. She admits as much, crinkling her nose when I ask what she likes about the city. It feels like another decision that has slipped beyond her control.
As for motherhood itself, Jackson is much more relaxed. She was 50 when she gave birth to Eissa, but seems happily detached from any anxieties about being an older parent. “The most important thing I’ve done, the biggest thing I’ve done, is become a mother, and it’s had a beautiful impact on my life,” she says. “I wanted to have three children, but thought, ‘I should stop there, that’s probably all I can handle.’ Because you have to give all of yourself, you have to spread the love, and I wouldn’t want any of them to feel left out if I had three. Obviously, you have to work, but you don’t come first any more. Your life completely changes. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Eissa is almost the same age his mother was when she made her TV debut, singing a duet with Randy on The Carol Burnett Show in 1975 to tens of millions of American households. Both she and her son have grown up surrounded by wealth, but how different does she think their childhoods are? “Completely different, because I worked and he doesn’t. And that’s it.” Jackson is firm. “I want him to experience being a child, because you don’t get to do this over. You’re an adult for the rest of your life, so I want him to enjoy each and every minute of being a child.”
Is she passing on the core values that were instilled in her, or is she parenting completely differently?
“Don’t you think you’ve learned from your parents?” she asks. “There are some things you wish your parents had done differently and you say, ‘No, I’m gonna tell [my son] this.’ Because if they had done this with me, it would have been much better for me as a child.” But, overall, she says she is grateful for the lessons she took from them. “I hated it as a kid, but I’m thankful for it now. I have to give credit to my parents for keeping me grounded.”
She hasn’t always been so generous. The pain of lost childhood is a recurring theme for the Jackson children, who were sadistically beaten by Joe and, in the case of La Toya, said she suffered horrific sexual abuse at his hands. Michael would come back to this loss repeatedly; his defenders wield it as some kind of defence for his befriending multiple young boys. Time may have softened the lens on her father, but it seems likely that Janet is hoping to clear some distance between the family name and the scandal it has been mired in. Her last position on the record, in her documentary, is that her father was “a good man” and that whatever people say about Michael, “he was my brother and I loved him”.
We move on to talk about the state of the nation. Jackson brought politics directly to the pop consciousness with Rhythm Nation, which addressed racism, poverty and inequality – all issues just as urgent today as they were 35 years ago. She is a prolific social media user, and has used her profile to support Black Lives Matter, to bring awareness to police brutality. Does she feel despondent about how slow change is in coming or is she hopeful about the future?
“Well, there’s all this child trafficking crap that’s going on and sex trafficking crap, you know what I mean, that wasn’t so prevalent then?” It’s a strange about-turn, not least because of the many allegations of child sexual abuse made against Michael. But it is also the most forceful she has been since we sat down. “At least, we didn’t know about it back then. I don’t think we did, did we? Not really. I think it’s really now out in the open, because it’s like a billion-dollar business and all that crap.”
I wonder what internet rabbit holes she’s been going down, but, before I can ask, she’s moved on.
“On [the Rhythm Nation album], for us, it was about making a difference in a kid’s life, a teenager’s life, from them taking this path with drugs and going down the wrong street to trying to make something of themself.”
On that record she sang about “joining voices in protest to social injustice” and “pushing toward a world rid of colour lines”. I wonder where she stands on the forthcoming election. After all, I say, America could be on the verge of voting in its first black female president, Kamala Harris.
“Well, you know what they supposedly said?” she asks me. “She’s not black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”
She looks at me expectantly, perhaps assuming that I have Indian heritage.
“Well, she’s both,” I offer.
“Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days,” she coughs. “I was told that they discovered her father was white.”
I’m floored at this point. It’s well known that Harris’s father is a Jamaican economist, a Stanford professor who split from her Indian mother when she was five. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris wrote in her book The Truths We Hold.
The people who are most vocal in questioning the facts of Harris’s identity tend to be hardcore QAnon-adjacent, Trump-loving conspiracy theorists. I don’t think Jackson falls into that camp, but I do wonder what the algorithms are serving her. I start again. Harris has dual heritage, I say, and, given this moment, does Jackson think America is ready for her – if we agree she’s black? Or, OK, a woman of colour?
“I don’t know,” Jackson stage whispers. “Honestly, I don’t want to answer that because I really, truthfully, don’t know. I think either way it goes is going to be mayhem.”
She doesn’t think there will be a peaceful transition of power?
“I think there might be mayhem,” she falters. “Either way it goes, but we’ll have to see.”
We have a few minutes left to wrap things up, so I throw some quick-fire questions at her while we recalibrate. When I ask what her biggest disappointment is, Jackson flashes back “every one of my marriages” without missing a beat. (Later she corrects herself to “just the last one”.) When prompted to say what it is that she can’t stand in other people, she casually brings up her brother Michael to explain how she hates pettiness and people who fake being nice.
“It’s like Mike said,” she explains, “when people throw a rock and hide their hands, you know, just starting some drama or pretending to create a scenario to make themselves look better, when they are really doing it out of meanness not kindness. You know what I mean?”
Several people from Jackson’s team are now hovering by the door; she’s on a tight schedule and hasn’t been feeling well all day.
There has always been feverish speculation about her private life, I say, and she has been very good at keeping it under wraps. But she has written about coercive control in her relationships. Does she feel she’s now able to break that pattern?
“I pray to God,” she offers. “I’m single, so I pray to God that I might have different lenses on these eyes than I did before.” She pauses. “I know that if someone were to come along … even if I didn’t recognise it, I guarantee you my friends would shake the shit out of me and say, ‘What are you doing?!’”
“But I think I’m seeing it through different lenses now. I think I am breaking that pattern.”
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