According to the press release, Unbreakable also marks the first time Janet has written about her brother (Michael, obviously, not Tito) and her childhood, creating the sense that this is an album she needed and wanted to make, rather than to fulfill a contract. Three years after her last studio album and the drama about the postponement of her Unbreakable World Tour due to motherhood issues, R&B singer Janet Jackson is ready to return with new music. In the 1980s you could get away with being an aloof megastar that no one will ever truly know, but social media means fans want to feel directly connected and part of the story (interestingly, the new album’s title, release date, artwork and single details were all announced by Janet via Twitter, while the song’s title track is a dedication to her fans). Her albums since have often told us about how much Janet enjoys having sex and little else. The Velvet Rope is often cited as her masterpiece – a deeply revealing song suite about her battles with depression and loneliness that also featured a handful of bangers. As Madonna’s found, chasing constantly shifting musical trends when you’ve helped shape the fabric of pop itself can sometimes make you look a bit desperate.Īnother key factor in people’s excitement is the promise of an insight into the real Janet Jackson. So will Unbreakable fit into radio’s current love of rib-rattling dancefloor behemoths? Well if lead single No Sleep’s sultry R&B purr is anything to go by, then no, but as with Beyoncé – another massive fan and the closest we have to a new breed of megastar – you sense that Janet’s more focused on cementing a legacy and creating a body of work, itself a fairly old-fashioned notion now, rather than trying to fight it out with Pitbull et al on the singles chart. So while they haven’t exactly been challenging the upper reaches of the charts during Janet’s absence, theirs is a creative alchemy on par with that of Quincy Jones and 1980s Michael. Perhaps the surest sign to fans that Unbreakable is a serious comeback is the return of collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, whose presence was missed on 2008’s Discipline. In the 80s you could get away with being an aloof megastar, but social media means fans want to feel directly connectedīut nods from your peers about your past glories doesn’t necessarily suggest an appetite for new material, as any hoary old rock goliath will tell you.
Launching the Unbreakable tour in Vancouver earlier this week, it seemed like Janet herself was also keen to put the focus back on her legacy, with hit after hit squeezed into the 33-song setlist.
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Her influence has also bled into the more alternative pop fringes, with blog-friendly downtempo R&B practitioners such as How To Dress Well and Shura citing 1997’s The Velvet Rope as a huge inspiration. That latter aspect is perhaps why there’s so much goodwill towards her return, with artists as diverse as Ciara, Dev Hynes, Tinashe and Jason Derulo all citing her music and performance style as an inspiration.
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