When a big star makes a cancel-worthy comment then shows up for a gig, you always wonder whether everyone is feeling the bad vibes. The audience is there to have a good time, and generally will. But after Janet Jackson, caught off-guard, told the Guardian that Kamala Harris isn’t black and that her father is white (a Trump line of attack – she also said there’d be “mayhem” no matter who won the US election) I trundled along to the O2 with some disappointment. The comments suggested a certain limited intellectual capacity, and you don’t want that from a building block of modern pop. Most of all, it suggested a bubble to me. What tiny, sealed world must Janet live in – who must she be surrounded by – to walk into a broadsheet interview without at least one line prepared on the concept of a first black female president?
I am very fond of Janet, so huge, but still so underrated. I admired the fact she cancelled a world tour because she decided to have a baby instead, at 49. The reaction to her “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Superbowl halftime show – when her right breast was exposed by Justin Timberlake – was medieval, though it reflects rather worse on him these days. She starts the London show dressed in something wondrous and inflated, halfway between a business suit and a bouncy castle; this comes off to reveal a smaller, equally pointy suit, and a smaller one still; then, for most of the show, she and her four male dancers (constantly flanking her, the ghosts of her brothers) are dressed in Gaultier-ish tartan. Jackson’s shoulders are as sharp as her gunshot beats. At most big gigs these days, there are large chunks of time when the main turn is absent from the stage, as set changes and complicated costumes are readied. Not so at Janet’s: she jerks her way through 40 songs in two hours (“I can go all night”) merging the hits into one medley, the surest way of reminding everyone of her legacy.
Janet comes from a pre-melismatic age in singing; even Mariah Carey was only just starting to warble when Jackson was having her big hits in the Nineties. Her voice has always been understated: soft and girlish like Michael’s, sometimes barely above a breath, and low in the mix like another instrument, blending into those strange, squiffy chord changes (“What have you done for me lately – ooh, ooh, OOH YEAH!”). The voice is part of what makes her sound so effortless: listen back to “Whoops Now” and it’s so easy-breezy it could just be the tale of a girl who’s double-booked herself.
In the past, there was an expectation that a star like Janet must make an entire show appear effortless too. This extended to a certain limit on chat, a coolness with the crowd. There is little warmth at first at the O2: when she freezes at the end of the song, it’s with a tough, solemn face, framed by a headset mic. But she warms up – a bit too much at one point, when she decides to get the audience to sing every single note of “Again” (the exquisite little 1993 piano ballad I’d come to hear) and does none of it herself. They weren’t singing particularly loud, either, so I couldn’t hear them, and three minutes and forty-five seconds passed with just her beatific smile! Someone pointed out that this song is hard to sing, and I did wonder at points whether she was fully singing every track; there are all sorts of clever vocal blenders at work these days, and no shame in it, not for one who’s constantly dancing.
At 58, Jackson barely stopped moving for two hours: she dabbed at the corner of her lips with a black towel. At one point I saw a chair being brought on stage and I assumed she was going to dance with it, in a cabaret style. It was positioned near her, before the lights went out for about seven seconds: when they went back up, the chair was gone and she was dancing. I can’t be sure, but I believe that Janet allowed herself to sit down for seven seconds in the dark, and didn’t want anyone to see.
[See also: How Green Day’s American Idiot pitted punk against George W Bush]
Content from our partners
Related
