Janet Jackson may have declared her independence from her famous family with 1986’s Control, but the youngest of the nine Jackson children made it known that she would be more than a one-album wonder three years later with Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. Guided by the production team of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis for the second time, Jackson made one of the decade’s most forward-thinking R&B albums, fusing pop and soul melodies with a hard-edged, hip-hop derived sound. As audacious as Control was (and I can’t think of that kind of album made by a female R&B singer before it), Rhythm Nation is (and probably will always remain) her career’s crowning achievement.

With Rhythm Nation, Janet decided to look at the world around her and make an album that was themed around having a social conscience. Of course, political music was nothing new in R&B music. Back in the Seventies, Marvin Gaye, The Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder, among others, spent as much time singing about political and social issues as they did singing about love and relationships. However, by the late Eighties, R&B had almost completely moved to the bedroom, while hip-hop had taken over as the genre to check out if you wanted to know what was going on in the world (to say nothing of rock acts like U2, Midnight Oil and Tracy Chapman).

Jackson got the idea for the album after learning about “nations,” groups of young people of various backgrounds who banded together to form sort of an intelligent alternative to street gangs. She decided to create a “nation” of her own, one that would center around music and dance as a means to discuss modern ills like racism, illiteracy and homelessness. Heady topics, to be sure, and granted, you’re not going to get much in the way of profundity here; after all, this is a Jackson we’re talking about . However, Jackson’s utopian, colorblind worldview resonated with her young, multi-ethnic group of fans, and with grooves as slammin’ as the ones Jam & Lewis cooked up, who cares about the words anyway? (more…)