On the go-go inflected stroll of Spending Time With You, Jackson sings of wanting to Use all our energyUnder the moonlight making love.Today, we revisit Janet Jacksons 2004 album, a lush and preeminently sex-positive album that deserves a reappraisal.
Damita Jo carries with it inadvertent weight, like a banal conversation with a loved one just a few hours before a fatal accident. ![]() ![]() Humid with shameless sexuality, it pointedly doubled down on the sensuality that for a decade had been pervading Jacksons artistry (including that Super Bowl performance). Jackson could have reined in this extended meditation on the joy of sexan MTV News report that ran mid-January 2004 suggested that she still had weeks of work left on the album after the Super Bowl. There were people who wanted me to take certain songs off the album cause they thought it would pose a problem, but that would be changing who I am, Jackson said on Good Morning America on March 31, 2004, the day after Damita Jo s release. Virtually every interview she sat through during the Damita Jo press cycle touched on the Super Bowl, to Jacksons visible discomfort. Worse yet, it was clear that it was open season on her body: Jay Leno solicited a kiss on air (That was greatyoure very good at that, he said after the peck), UK chat-show host Jonathan Ross noted, What a pretty face youve got, and David Letterman grilled the usually unflappable Jackson enough to exasperate her. Can we talk about something else cause I dont want to focus on my breast she asked after about 10 minutes worth of Super Bowl questions. Damita Jo Janet Jackson Series Of CommercialLargely ignored by listeners and received tepidly by critics, Damita Jo is something of a stain on Jacksons recording legacy, the first in a series of commercial disappointments that quantified how the mighty had fallen. Art that does examine the simple fact that new couples tend to fuck a lotlike Nagisa shimas 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses, or Gaspar Nos Love from 2015often finds a legacy of notoriety. Damita Jo was inspired by Jacksons relationship with producer Jermaine Dupri, whom she had been dating for about a year and a half when the album was finally released. You could interpret this as spin for daytime television, or take her at her word: Damita Jo s thematic foundation of love necessitated frank discussions of sex. Focusing on love didnt whitewash the sex; it contextualized it. You could further, as many critics did, suspect that Jackson was being provocative for the sake of selling records, or you could trust her as an artist who had long earned that trust. A lot of people know that sex sells, and I think they use that. For me, its something thats true to memy friends will tell you that sex is truly a big part of my life, she told Blender. Damita Jo Janet Jackson Free Of ConsequencesThe sex that Jackson had written and sung about, particularly on Damita Jo and its 2001 predecessor, All for You (Jacksons swinging single album, recorded in the wake of her split from her husband of nine years, Rene Elizondo Jr.) was presented as free of consequences. These were fantasies on top of fantasies, a meta-utopia in which a woman and superstar could express herself so explicitly and remain unscathed by the shame. Damita Jo Janet Jackson Full Of ItThat Jackson chose mostly mid-tempo RB of the liminal, undistinguished mid-aughts variety to deliver Damita Jo s subtle treatise surely wouldnt convince naysayers who rolled their eyes at yet more baby-making music in a genre full of it from an artist whod been inviting us to her bed regularly for over a decade. I do movies, I do dance, I do musicI love doin my man, she sings in the title track, whose propulsive hook is heralded by an ascending horn figure, recalling some cheery 70s sitcom theme song. On Damita Jo, sex is alternately found in a clubs dank corners and is so dressed up in euphemism as to sound like something out of old Hollywood. On I Want You, a Kanye West co-production, she coos, Have your way with me, over a sample of B.T. Expresss Close To You thats pitched up so that its strings take on the frantic emotional timbre of a Douglas Sirk movie.
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