Janet appears in the latest edition of Q, a British music magazine. Read the interview here:
“We want the room swept for bugs.” In a London hotel suite, one of Janet Jackson’s managers is tweaking plans for the star’s forthcoming advance into Europe. She barks orders to an Italian hotel manager on the phone. But it’s clear the hapless flunky at the other end misunderstands. He is promising the maid will definitely get into all those fiddly corners before Jackson arrives. “No! Sweep for bugs!” insists the manager, tartly. “A counter-surveillance sweep for recording devices. That’s an absolute must.”
At least everything at London’s Metropolitan hotel is at its luxury zenith. Four managers, two publicists, her nutritionist, Dave, and her gym instructor, Tony, huddle and gabble in the Jackson operations nerve centre. With talk of a stalker in the vacinity, visit conditions are at optimum frenzy level. Which is a shame, since Jackson’s ninth album 20Y.O., is a further attempt to establish the youngest of the R&B dynasty as “the normal one”. But Jackson has still contributed much to tabloid mythology. It began with a secret marriage aged 18 to James DeBarge and persistent, though denied, rumours of a love-child. Eager to establish a persona outside the Jackson family, she has released a succession of emotionally confessional and highly sexualised albums over the last decade.
American moral arbiters baulked at the simulated phone sex on 1997’s The Velvet Rope. By 2004 they had all the ammo they needed. At the Superbowl performance with Justin Timberlake that February there was outrage when her right breast was exposed to 100 million TV viewers. Timberlake tore away her top during a dance routine to ‘Rock Your Body’ and later described the incident as a “wardrobe malfunction”. There were fines, lawsuits and even a change in indecency law passed in the US House of Representatives.
Janet has turned to super-producer and boyfriend Jermaine Dupri to effect a now-familiar diva transformation. He achieved it spectacularly with Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation Of Mimi last year. Janet, too, requires reinvention as a streetwise vamp. The night before the interview, Dupri invited me to a West London studio to hear 20Y.O. He was voluble on the “many Janets” we will encounter on this album, but maintained a robot distance when asked if executive producing a track about your girlfriend giving herself a hand-job is weird. “It’s business,” he said in a Cyberman voice.
Before meeting Janet, there are email, telephone and verbal warnings – neither the Superbowl nor her brother Michael may be mentioned. Entering her suite it feels like a supervised prison visit in a future world where felon care has been farmed out to World Of Leather. Jackson – looking like an African-American Vicky Pollard: ripped jeans, a fitted denim jacket showcasing bunched breasts, scraped-back hair in a scrunchie and big, hooped earrings – sits staring at her knees. The frail, falsetto Jackson “Hello” is inmistakeable. Initially the interview experience is awful, Jackson burning with defensive energy. There is prim, nervous coughing and that little voice cracks as though she might start crying.
The new album 20Y.O. stands for 20 Years Old. But you’re 40.
That’s a statement. Are you going to ask me a question?Why is it called 20 Years Old?
Because it’s 20 years since Control, which is where I begin… OK, I never wanted to sing. I did it because my father told me to. I got a contract aged 14. I was given music: “Here, do this. Do that.” I never made any waves. I actually wanted to go and do Business Law and pay for that by acting. I could be an actress with something to fall back on. By 18 I was in (US TV Series) Fame. I was married and I wasn’t happy at all. I tried to get fired and finally asked them to let me out of my contract, which they did. Only then did I think, “I want to try singing again.” But this time, my way. I fired my father as a manager and made Control. This anniversary is so important to me. It took a lot for me to do that, given the shy kid that I was.