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Report post to moderatorTaken as a complete artistic statement, Rhythm Nation 1814 was a stunning achievement. It married the pleasures of pop with the street energy and edge of hip-hop. It was by turns dark and radiant, calculated and carefree, political and playful, sensual and austere, sermonic and liberating. If Control announced the arrival of a young woman ready to take the reins of her personal life and career,Rhythm Nation revealed a maturing artist, surveying the world around her, determined to wake people out of apathy, cynicism, indifference. Writes Slant’s Eric Henderson, “Rhythm Nation expanded Janet's range in every conceivable direction. She was more credibly feminine, more crucially masculine, more viably adult, more believably childlike. This was, of course, critical to a project in which Janet assumed the role of mouthpiece for a nationless, multicultural utopia.”
“We are a nation with no geographic boundaries,” declared Janet on the album’s introductory “pledge,” “pushing toward a world rid of color lines.” Just seven years earlier, black artists couldn’t get on MTV; FM radio was dominated by album-oriented (white) rock; and the music industry was largely segregated by genre. Now a black woman was at the helm of a new pop-cultural “nation,” preaching liberation through music and dance, while calling on her audience to keep up the struggle. For all the inroads, she insisted, the battle wasn’t over.
Janet Jackson’s ascendance was significant for many reasons, not the least of which was how it coincided with (and spoke to) the rise of black feminism. Until the 1980s, feminism was dominated, by and large, by middle class white women. They defined its terms, its causes, its hierarchies, its representations, and its icons. It wasn’t, of course, that black feminists didn’t exist before the 1980s. From Sojourner Truth to Harriet Tubman to Ida B. Wells to Rosa Parks to Maya Angelou—black women made enormous contributions in the struggle for racial, gender, and class equality. But their contributions were often minimized, and their struggles marginalized. As Barbara Smith writes in her landmark 1977 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” “Black women’s existence, experience, and culture and the brutally complex systems of oppression which shape these are in the ‘real world’ of white and/or male consciousness beneath consideration, invisible, unknown ... It seems overwhelming to break such a massive silence.”
Black feminism, however, did just that in the 1980s. From Michelle Wallace’s bestselling Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman (described by Ms. magazine as “the book that will shape the 80s”), to Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple (which was adapted into a blockbuster film, directed by Steven Spielberg), black women achieved unprecedented breakthroughs over the course of the decade. In 1981, bell hooks released Ain’t I A Woman; in 1984, Audre Lorde published Sister Outsider; 1987 saw the arrival of Toni Morrison’sBeloved, perhaps the most universally canonized novel of the past 30 years. Appropriately capping the decade was Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (1990), which documented and synthesized the flourishing movement’s central ideas and concerns. The book, Collins wrote, was intended to be “both individual and collective, personal and political, one reflecting the intersection of my unique biography with the larger meaning of my historical times.”
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If there was one female artist in the 1980s who captured this spirit in popular music it was Janet Jackson in Rhythm Nation. It was an album that positioned a multifaceted, dynamic black woman as a leader, as someone whose ideas, experiences and emotions mattered. It challenged some of the most deeply entrenched scripts for women in popular culture. It also offered an alternative to the era’s other most powerful female icon: Madonna.
While they were not-so-friendly rivals, in certain ways Janet and Madonna helped trailblaze similar terrain. Both were strong, intelligent, fiercely ambitious artists. Neither expressed any reticence about their desire for mass commercial success. Both were engaged in similar struggles for respect, empowerment and agency in an industry dominated by men and male expectations. Both also faced serious pushback from music critics. In the 1980s, music reviews were frequently filtered through a rock-centric (read: white, male, and heteronormative) lens. “Pop creations” like Janet and Madonna were viewed with suspicion, if not outright contempt. The fact that they didn’t conform to traditional singer-songwriter expectations proved they lacked talent. The fact that they had talented collaborators and producers proved they lacked credibility. The fact that dance and image were important parts of their artistic presentation proved they lacked authenticity. As The New York Times’ Jon Pareles wrote in a 1990 review of Janet’s Rhythm Nation Tour: “Miss Jackson seems content simply to flesh out an image whose every move and utterance are minutely planned. Spontaneity has been ruled out; spectacle reigns, and the concert is as much a dance workout as a showcase for songs.”
Janet and Madonna offered distinct versions of feminist liberation and empowerment.
In spite of such headwind, however, Janet and Madonna became two of the most influential icons of the late 20th century, each offering distinct versions of feminist liberation and empowerment to a generation of young people coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s. VH1 ranked them No. 1 and No. 2 respectively in their “50 Greatest Women of the Video Era.” On Billboard’s 2013 list of Top Artists in Hot 100 History, Madonna was No. 2 and Janet was No. 7. Over the course of their respective careers, Madonna has 12 No. 1 hits; Janet has 10. Madonna has 38 Top Ten singles; Janet has 27 (placing them both among the top 10 artists of all time). Both, meanwhile, have sold hundreds of millions of albums and influenced American culture in incalculable ways.
Yet in spite of their similar commercial achievements and cultural impact, Janet Jackson remains, by comparison, grossly undervalued by critics and historians. Try to find a book on her career, cultural significance, or creative work, and with the exception of her 2011 autobiography, True You: A Journey To Finding and Loving Yourself, which focuses on her struggles with body image and self-esteem, you will come up empty-handed. Do the same with Madonna, and you will find at least 20 books by major publishers.
The disparities are not simply in the amount of coverage, but in how each artist is interpreted and understood. In print coverage, both in the 1980s and today, Madonna is made the default representative of feminism and of the era (in a1990 editorial for the New York Times, cultural critic Camille Paglia famously declared her “the future of feminism”). Madonna was perceived as somehow more important and interesting, more clever and cerebral. Her sense of irony and play with sexuality made her more appealing to postmodernists than Janet’s socially conscious sincerity. In 1989, Madonna was named “Artist of the Decade” by Billboard and MTV. Since that time, the appreciation gap has only widened.
In 2008, Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In spite of her trailblazing career, Janet has yet to receive the same honor. She has been eligible for six years. Many believe she is still being punished for the 2004 Super Bowl controversy often referred to as “Nipplegate,” the response to which has been described as "one of the worst cases of mass hysteria in America since the Salem witch trials." It is hard to believe, given the controversies surrounding just about every artist inducted into the Hall of Fame, that this would be used as a legitimate rationale for her exclusion. But then again, it’s hard to imagine how an artist of Janet’s stature has yet to be nominated.
Long before Beyoncé, Janet carved out a space for the openly feminist, multidimensional pop star. She created a blueprint that hundreds of thousands of artists have followed, from Britney Spears to Ciara to Lady Gaga. Rhythm Nation 1814 was the album that revolutionized her career and the pop landscape. It demonstrated that black women needn’t be second to anyone. But it wasn’t individualistic. Its rallying call was about the collective we. We could be a part of the creative utopia—the rhythm nation—regardless of race, gender, class, sexuality or difference. It made you want to dance and change the world at the same time. Unrealistic, perhaps. But 25 years later, it’s still hard to listen and not want to join the movement.
