Janet Jackson

With the pressures of child stardom a fading memory and Control over her sound well established, Janet Jackson positively erupts out of her fourth album. This is Janet at her strongest, her most powerful, unhindered by diets and domineering fathers, and with more than a few things to get off her chest. And dang, is Damita Jo versatile: She flexes her activist muscles on "State of the World," waxes kittenish on "Come Back to Me" and makes codependence sound fierce on "Miss You Much." Our personal fave, however, is the Rocker Chick Janet of "Black Cat". Meow!

Janet Jackson's last album opened with a declaration of independence: "This is a story
about control," she announced. "My control." Three years later, her follow-up casts a
wider net, moving from personal freedom to more universal concerns – injustice,
illiteracy, crime, drugs – without missing a beat. Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation (a title that
puts ego before social conscience) begins with the distant sound of a tolling bell... More >

She's still Janet Jam-Lewis to me--Quincy Jones's natural bodily rhythms are nothing like Thriller's, but every Flyte Tyme production has showed off these angular beats. Not so smashingly is all--if the P-Funk pretensions of "nation" are a little much from somebody whose knowledge of the world is based on the 6 o'clock news, the "rhythm" is real, and I give her credit for it. Her voice is as unequal to her vaguely admonitory politics as it was to her declaration of sexual availability, but the music is the message: never before have Jam & Lewis rocked so hard for so long. Best slow stuff: the murmured moans and irregular breathing of the sexually available "Someday Is Tonight." (Grade: A-)