I’ve been publishing work about pop culture since 2010, because that’s one of the many oh my god I didn’t know adults could do this and get taken seriously surprises I got from my grad school program. So I’m emphatically no stranger to writing about the divas and TV shows that helped shape my consciousness growing up. But up until now, I’ve avoided writing about Janet Jackson, because her sensual, sexually forthright and utterly fearless Janet. was the firmament for the fantasy world I began constructing in the 6 weeks that I spent in a post-surgery body cast at 9 years old, a 3-foot bar connecting my calves.
Why did sexuality mean so much to me at such an early age? I’ll get to that. First, we’ll need to go where it all took place: Corrales, New Mexico, firmly the middle of nowhere, in a house with dark brown shag carpeting and a chicken coop out back, tragically empty of our chickens because we had 3 dogs. All 3 of them deserve their own scroll-length odes, remarkable dogs that they were, but for our purposes we’ll be focusing on my little red dachshund, Sweetcakes, because he’s the one that slept curled up at my feet and spent every moment of his dog-naps on my pillow during those harrowing six weeks. There was something he understood about my situation that, as a child, I wouldn’t even be able to put into words, but something in our bond filled in for the words that honestly, no one had.
Before I came home from the hospital after the surgery that instigated all this, my mom bought four state-of-the-art speakers for the living room and a 5-disc CD changer, because she understood, in the same way my musician father understood, that music contained something in it that was something like my bond with Sweetcakes, a power we can never really capture with words, that heals when nothing else can promise to.
I am not a back sleeper, and I’ve never been, but for six weeks I had to lie on my back, unable to move. I couldn’t sleep. Nights I just screamed until I was too exhausted to scream anymore and finally caught my z’s then. (After the body cast with the 3-foot bar was removed, I was put into a walking cast, and I almost fell asleep as soon as I could move to my side). Nights were a living nightmare, but the days were better. Days, I dictated my homework to my mom who brought it to my teachers the next day, and I had my dogs, and I had music.
The songs off Janet., though, went beyond songs. Janet was introducing me to a liberated world, a world full of ecstatic sensations that were far away from the suffering I was experiencing, and an intriguing, sexy web of relationships that were the deep, shiny, velvety versions of the classmate-crushes I had already gotten several memorable jolts from. Before the lyrics even start, a song like “That’s the Way Love Goes” sets an undeniable mood, and I knew that mood, because it was akin to what happened when the lights went out at sleepovers and, under the protective tent of a blanket, you could get to the juicy observations you or someone else had made, or simply the thoughts that, by day, you didn’t admit to having. After midnight at a sleepover, something came alive, and it wasn’t something that (we’re forming a theme) I had ever had the words for, but Janet did. She was no child, obviously, but that was exactly what made her such an icon: she was a woman, a magnificently beautiful woman who danced like guided flames, and becoming a woman could mean getting to be more like her. She wasn’t just sexy, she was self-possessed. She didn’t let sexuality or anything else happen to her, she owned it. That confidence — that absence of fear of getting into trouble — that’s what Janet had that I’d never seen. (And I don’t think we’ve seen her like since.)
“Anytime, Anyplace” scared me, I’ll admit, not just because it was about sex in a public place — a thought that likely terrified me precisely because of that fear of getting into trouble — but because it sounded comparatively more minor than the other songs, and I absolutely craved a poppish sound at that time. Even the outright rebelliousness, “Anytime, anyplace, I don’t care who’s around,” made me stiffen a little. Aren’t you supposed to care? And if you don’t care you’re not allowed to just say that…are you?
One track I deliberately avoided was “Throb,” because I was somehow schooled enough even then in terrible, terrible romance novels to have an idea what that referred to, and I wasn’t ready for that one. (In preparation for this essay I listened to it yesterday and, while I can say as an adult that I love it, it’s almost too much, like you’ve actually walked in on Janet and her then-boyfriend-and-collaborator. It’s an effective anthem as sonic aphrodisiacs go, but so effective that I’m not quite sure when the best moment to listen to it might be. Right before? During? I don’t think I’ll ever know.)
If things got a little too adult for my burgeoning tastes, however, I had “Whoops Now,” the jauntiest tribute to vacation that anyone of any age could ask for. There was also the effervescently sweet “Again,” which didn’t bring me to child-tears the way it would much later when I understood the sentiment, but the ballad gave me everything I wanted, ear-wise, when I needed something soft.
Watching the recent documentary on Janet, I found out much to my shock that “Again,” one of the most mesmerizing music videos possible, was the public’s first introduction to her as, in the words of a close friend of hers, a “sex icon.” Before that, she had been known to the world as the adorable little sister of the legendary Jackson Five, and as a teenager was impossibly hemmed in by her notoriously tyrannical father/manager. Janet., the album, was a woman free. Watching this story play out, I wondered, perhaps crazily, “Could I have sensed that, as a kid? Did I get that Janet’s relationship to her own sexuality was hard-won, that she fought her family and conditioning to become who she wanted to become? At an early age, I felt the power in “You Want This” (I can tell you from 5th grade slumber parties that we all did) even if I didn’t know what “this” was, couldn’t define what anyone “wanted,” and had no “you” to sing to.
Power in the world that Janet so vigorously inhabit was, for me, the power to imagine that there was life outside of where I was right then. There was a life beyond these casts, and these scars, even if I’d have the scars all my life. There was life beyond the arduous process of learning to walk, first with a walker, then gradually with crutches, after the operation had “fixed” my habitual toe-walking by stretching my hamstrings manually. There was a life beyond hospitals, beyond this crushing dependence, beyond having to wash my hair in a bucket with other people’s hands because there was no way to get me to a bathroom. (So yes, life beyond a bedpan too.)
There was a life, far away as it felt, where I could be beautiful, and I could have feelings worth writing about rather than escaping from. Somehow, Janet’s celebration of the body and its capacity for roof-breaking pleasure seemed to apply to all bodies, even mine. And it didn’t matter that I couldn’t dance like Janet, because nobody dances like Janet. The point was, I could dance (once I got the casts off). And if I could dance, then I could do any number of the tantalizing things that her voice and lyrics paint so beautifully. I couldn’t see the world beyond, on my own. But I saw it with her help. And the fact is, I still do.
