Janet Jackson Played Michael Her New Music. His Reaction Surprised Her. S
In 1985, Janet Jackson was 20 years old. She had been famous since she was a child, had appeared on television, had made records, had been present in the public consciousness in the specific way of someone who is related to famous people, and who is, as a result, known before they have done anything on their own to be known.
She was Janet Jackson. Her family name was Michael Jackson’s family name. Her older brothers had defined American popular music twice. First, in the 1970s as the Jackson 5, and then, in the person of Michael alone, in the 1980s, in a way that had not been anticipated, and that had produced the best-selling album in the history of recorded music.
She had spent her professional life, up to that point, in the context of that name and that legacy. The records she had made before 1985 had been competent. They had not been what she knew she could do. In 1985, she went to Minneapolis and worked with two producers named Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. She came back with something different.
What she came back with was Control. Control was not a Janet Jackson album in the sense that the records she had previously made were Janet Jackson albums. Those records had been made within structures, record label structures, production structures, family structures, that had shaped them according to expectations and requirements that existed outside of what she herself wanted to make.
Control was the first record she had made in which those structures were not in charge. She was in charge. That is what the album was about. In its title, in its lyrical content, in the specific defined assertive sound that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis had built around her voice. The specific songs that Control contained were each of them departures from what Janet Jackson had recorded before.
Not in the sense of random experimentation, but in the sense of someone who has identified the gap between what they have been doing and what they are capable of and has moved deliberately to close it. Nasty was a statement. It was a song about the right to be left alone, the right to define the terms of your own engagement with the world delivered over a groove that was simultaneously harder and more controlled than anything Janet Jackson had previously been associated with.
It was not a song that her family name made easy to receive in the specific way she intended it. It required the listener to set aside the image of Janet Jackson as a younger Jackson sibling and to hear the song as the work of a 20-year-old woman who had something specific and direct to say. Control itself, the title track, was more explicit about its subject.
It was a song about taking control of her life, about the specific experience of growing up in a context that had managed her and managed her image and managed her career and about what it felt like to step outside of that management and make the decisions herself. In the context of her family and specifically in the context of what Michael Jackson’s career represented at that moment, the most managed, most produced, most commercially deliberate artistic output in the history of pop music, Control a document of independence. She played it for Michael. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis had been building a specific production sound in Minneapolis through the early 1980s that was, by 1985, one of the most distinctive and influential production approaches in American popular music.
They had worked with The Time and with SOS Band and with a range of artists who had shaped the early 1980s R&B landscape. They understood rhythm and arrangement and the specific quality of a groove, the thing that a production does to a body, the way a track sits in the space between music and movement, at a level that very few producers in any era have managed.
What they heard in Janet Jackson was not what the industry expected to find there. The industry saw a young woman from a famous family who had made a few records and who had not yet produced anything that required the industry to pay the specific kind of attention it paid to things it could not categorize easily.
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis heard something different. They heard a voice and a presence and a specific quality of determination that they believed could be built into something that did not fit the existing categories. The sessions that produced Control were sessions in which Janet Jackson was, for the first time in her professional life, the primary voice in the room.
She had opinions about the production. She had opinions about the lyrics. She had opinions about what the album should sound like and what it should say and what it should ask the audience to understand about who she was and what she was capable of. Those opinions were, in the context of her family name and the specific expectations that name carried, not entirely expected.
They were hers. They were real. They shaped the album into something that the record it preceded, Dream Street, 1984, had given no indication was possible. Michael Jackson’s reaction, by the accounts of people who were present or near the exchange, was not what Janet had fully anticipated. She had anticipated that he would be supportive.
Michael Jackson was, by everyone’s account, a supportive older brother in the context of his siblings’ musical careers. What she had not fully anticipated was that the reaction would be what it was, genuine and specific, and coming from a musician rather than from a brother. He did not respond with the general approval of someone performing encouragement.
He responded to the music. He responded to what she had done, to the specific choices she had made, to the production, to the performances, to the quality of what Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis had built around her, and what she had brought to it. He said it was extraordinary. He said she had made something that was entirely itself, something that was not trying to be anything except what it was.
And that being entirely itself was the hardest thing to do. For Janet Jackson, receiving that response from that person carried a weight that responses from most other people could not have carried. Michael Jackson was not someone who offered musical assessments carelessly. He was not performing encouragement for the benefit of a sibling who needed to feel good about what she had made.
He was a musician assessing another musician’s work. And what he was assessing in this case was the work of someone who had spent her entire professional life being the younger sister of the most successful musician in history. He heard the music. He said what he thought. That was what she had needed him to do.
The specific circumstance of Janet Jackson playing the Control recordings for Michael Jackson has been described in fragments across the years since. In Janet’s own interviews, in accounts from people who were near the family during that period, the picture that emerges is consistent in its general shape.
A private moment somewhere in the Los Angeles context in which both of them moved, in which Janet played her brother the new music she had made and waited for his response. What Michael Jackson heard when he heard the Control recordings was something he had not expected to hear from his younger sister.
He had heard Janet’s previous records. He had understood, in the way that a sibling who is also a musician understands another sibling’s work, what she had been doing and what the records had demonstrated about what she was capable of. The previous records had been competent. They had shown a performer who had talent and who had not yet been placed in a context that matched her ability.
They had not prepared him for what he heard when she played him Control. What he heard was a voice he recognized, the voice of his sister, the voice he had grown up with, the voice that was in some way related to the voices of all the Jacksons operating in a context that did not belong to any of them.
A context that was entirely hers. A production environment that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis had built around what she specifically was. Not around what a Jackson was expected to be, but around what Janet was. What she wanted to say. What she needed the music to do for her. He heard something he had not heard from her before.
He heard her. Control was released in February of 1986. It reached number one on the Billboard 200. It produced five top five singles. Nasty reached number three on the pop charts. What have you done for me lately reached number four. When I Think of You reached number one making Janet Jackson the first solo artist to have a number one hit from a debut album if Control, which was technically her second album with A&M records, is considered her true debut.
The critical response to Control was significant in a way that went beyond the commercial performance. Critics recognized it as something more than a successful pop album. As a document of a particular kind of creative independence. Of a young woman claiming authorship over her own artistic life in a specific and audible way.
The album went on to sell over 14 million copies worldwide. It was certified multi-platinum in multiple countries. It changed the direction of pop and R&B production in the second half of the 1980s with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s production style becoming one of the most influential approaches in the industry.
What the commercial response confirmed was what Michael Jackson had heard when Janet played him the music in 1985, that she had made something that did not need to be anything other than what it was. The audience heard it the same way he had heard it, as something entirely itself, as something that stood on its own, as something that required no comparison to anything that had preceded it to be understood as extraordinary.
The dynamic between Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson across the years of their careers was one of the more interesting relationships in American popular music. Interesting not because it was dramatic or troubled, but because of the specific challenge it presented. How do you develop as an artist when your older sibling is Michael Jackson? The challenge was not simply one of expectation, though the expectation was real.
The challenge was one of identity, of finding and claiming a musical voice that was entirely your own in a context where your last name carried the specific weight of what that last name had already produced. Every record Janet Jackson made was heard in relation to what Michael Jackson had made. Every critical assessment of her work, every chart position, every commercial comparison was conducted against the backdrop of Thriller and Off the Wall and the Jackson 5 and everything else that the name Jackson had produced.
Control was her answer to that challenge. Not an answer in the sense of trying to match what her brother had done. She had made a specific, deliberate choice not to compete on that terrain. Her answer was to make something that existed on an entirely different terrain that was so completely her own that the comparison to her brother’s work became irrelevant because the two bodies of work were not trying to do the same thing.
That is a harder thing to do than it sounds. It requires knowing who you are with enough clarity that you can make decisions about what the music should be based on that knowledge rather than based on what the surrounding context the family name, the commercial expectations, the critical comparisons suggests it should be.
Janet Jackson knew who she was in the recording studios in Minneapolis in 1985 with a clarity that had not been visible in her earlier work. The relationship between Control and Michael Jackson’s assessment of it is, in retrospect, one of the more quietly significant musical exchanges of the 1980s.
Not because Michael Jackson’s approval was required for Control to be what it was. The album was what it was independent of any assessment he made of it but because of what the exchange reveals about both of them. It reveals something about Janet Jackson that she made the album she needed to make that she found the people who could help her make it and that she was ready to share it with the person whose judgment she most valued her brother who was also the most successful musician alive from a position of confidence in what she had done. It reveals something about Michael Jackson that he heard the music for what it was, not for what it came from and that what he heard in his younger sister’s work was something that required him to respond as a musician
rather than as an older brother performing encouragement. He recognized what she had done. He said so. Janet Jackson’s career in the years following Control went on to establish her as one of the most significant pop artists of the late 20th century. The work she did with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis across the subsequent decade, Rhythm Nation 1814, Janet, Design of a Decade, confirmed what Control had established, that she was a complete artist, that the work was entirely hers, and that the comparison to her brother’s career was a comparison that existed in other people’s minds rather than in the music itself. The music itself was its own thing. Michael Jackson had heard that when she played it for him in 1985,
he had heard something he had not expected. He had heard his sister become herself.
