Her Super Bowl performance was the most blatant example, but Ms. Jackson's been pushing the envelope her entire career.
Eight years ago, Janet Jackson told America that we could address her as "Ms. Jackson, if you're nasty," but now that America has seen her breast on national television, what do we call her? Janet has been trying to cross raw sexuality with wholesome charm for years, just like so many other modern female performers. But when she chose to expose herself at the Super Bowl, an event embraced by the heartland of America, her public exposure became a source of national outrage. While one could argue that Janet fully intended to use the resulting media exposure to boost her career, the reality is that she may finally have crossed the line — at her own expense.
She might have entered into the public eye as a nice young girl on Good Times and made her musical breakthrough with her chunky, spunky dancing in "The Pleasure Principle" video, but Janet Jackson has been working on the naughty side of her resume since 1993. The irony is that one of her first attempts at indecent exposure is not unlike that witnessed at the Super Bowl. As a prelude to the release of her album janet, Ms. Jackson posed topless — with a man's hands covering her bare bosom — on the cover of Rolling Stone. The image caused quite a stir at the time, but matched up with a hit pop single (the non-controversial "That's The Way Love Goes"), any outcry dissipated. (Of course, it was hardly the first time Rolling Stone had featured a risqué cover.)
From that point on, Janet kept pushing the sexual envelope, but always alternating with more clean-cut imagery. She would move from the "If" video, packed with steamy shots from a mock Asian brothel, to the "Runaway" video, which looked more like a world travel video than any kind of sex-fest. She would release a single like "All For You," where she proclaims that she's found a "nice package" to "ride all night," but give it a video with harmless choreography that virtually ignored the song's lyrics. She would release records where she would spit out the F-word and speak of not having a chance to come, then appear in The Nutty Professor II as the virtual girl-next-door. But now, after a year or so out of the limelight, Janet returned with an act more explicit than any she had dared before.
When you look at the facts, it's almost understandable why Janet would attempt such a stunt. The Super Bowl is one, if not the, most-watched television event of the year — and just so happens to air less than two months before Janet's new record is released. Her previous album came out three years ago and, while it did sell well, it was not seen as the success that some of her earlier records were. While most of the public was probably unaware of the recently announced record release date, it doesn't hurt that it was noted in almost all of the press articles about the incident. It's pretty hard to get such a choice piece of marketing info out into major news channels, but having such a major event "happen" certainly helps.
The morning after the Super Bowl, Janet's label, Virgin Records, released her new single to radio stations. Considering that there was no single release previously scheduled, it could only have been done to capitalize on the publicity stunt. It certainly wasn't because of her appearance on the Super Bowl — that had been known for some time — but because of what happened.
The involvement of Justin Timberlake also increases the media payback on the stunt. Justin Timberlake and almost any woman he's seen with warrants a newspaper headline or feature in these times, so he becomes an ideal partner in the plan. Coupled with the rumors of their brief tryst earlier last year, their mere appearance together would have been noted, but this blows the socks off any rumors.
While Janet was largely MIA last year, but is still unavoidably linked to her brother Michael's high-profile child molestation case. Nasty court cases are not a good introduction to a new record, but a flash of skin can push all those stories away.
It's not as if female musicians' sexuality hadn't been capturing the eye of the press repeatedly. In the last year alone, Rolling Stone presented a diagram of Christina Aguilera's piercings, the Madonna-Britney sapphic pause has already received its fair share of ink, and even innocuous Michelle Branch just stripped down for Maxim. The difference is that these moments came when and where they would be expected — through TV and magazine arenas that have long been mixing up rock and sex — and not an event that is the nearly sacred representation of conservative American values.
This misjudgment of venue may very well haunt Janet. While it's hard to believe that MTV (who produced the halftime show) did not know of the stunt, it's quite possible that CBS didn't know and the NFL certainly didn't. When you have both CBS and the NFL talking about how depraved the breast exposure was, it's not a good thing. When the FCC threatens CBS and all of its affiliates with multiple-thousand dollar fines, that makes people very angry — also not a good thing. When you have conservative groups already on the warpath for public decency on the airwaves, a harmless boob becomes incendiary.
If the Super Bowl exposure (no pun intended) helps to popularize her new single, it very well may be worth it. But, if the new single doesn't catch on, the stunt may be for naught, as most any front-page news won't hold interest for too long. Furthermore, with major networks fearing more FCC investigations and conservative group protests, Janet now risks being barred from future public performances — performances where she might have been able to perform music from her new album. Now that she's the girl who crossed the line at the Super Bowl, she's the girl who can't be trusted. In this current sociopolitical climate, she's not worth the risk. Even though it's highly unlikely she'll be attempting such a stunt again, she is also likely to be penalized in retribution for the wrath she's seen as having brought on CBS and MTV.
So where does this all leave Janet? She can send her videotaped apologies around all she wants, but the damage has been done and the possible benefits are just that — only a possibility. Instead of boosting her career, her breast exposure could become better known for what came after: the FCC investigations, the change of attitude towards televised events, the new sanitized American entertainment. In the end, it's all going to come down to what it should have been about in the beginning: a good song. If she has that, she's got a future. If not, at least she can always strip to her old hits.
