Janet Jackson - Yours seriously, Janet

She grew up the little sister of the world's most successful (and dysfunctional) musical family. Somewhere in the past few years she's outstripped even her megastar brother. Janet Jackson talks - exclusively - to RUSSELL BAILLIE.

For Janet Jackson, it's another hotel lounge in another city in another hemisphere a few days before playing yet another show.

It's another interview about what it's like being Janet Jackson. It's about just how big the gap between her first and second names might be now. It's about life as a self-reinventing self-determined pop princess, a mega-famous little sister, a multi-millionaire artist with a conscience.

And someone who, despite taking her song and dance out in front of tens of thousands most nights of the week, says she's shy: "I could never get up in front of 10 people and do that. God are you kidding? And I get every embarrassed being the centre of attention. How stupid does that sound? Does that sound stupid?"

It's serious stuff this.

But Ms Jackson, all jet-lagged 1.7m of her - she's arrived in Christchurch from South Africa via a non-playing stop in Australia - doesn't seem to mind. She seems serious by nature.

Though once we're beyond the well-trodden territory about her most recent album Velvet Rope being her most distressingly, cathartically personal, it actually gets fascinating and fun. Jackson can swear like a trouper and when she laughs you can only but bask in the glory of her all-American dentistry and laugh along too.

Other times though, she'll fix you with a stare from those feline eyes, and, with her eerily low soft voice you can only help but hang on her every word.

Even if sometimes those words are saying something that sounds worn smooth with repetition. Or when they're veering dangerously towards the I-really-want-to-help-people/I've-suffered-too pop star platitudes.

It's now a year since the release of the Velvet Rope, her sixth solo album since her 1982 self-titled debut (the first of two twee albums recorded in her teens post roles on telly shows Fame and Diff'rent Strokes.

The latest effort has met with some resistance by the Jackson faithful who lapped up her previous blockbusters.

Thought it's now sold in excess of 5.5 million albums worldwide, helped no doubt by her punishing touring schedule.

But perhaps initially she just scared some people off. What with a first single Got Til It's Gone relying on a sampled hook - of Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi - which ran her close to the dull pop magpie tendencies of Puff Daddy. Or perhaps it was the bondage imagery of the title and songs like Rope Burn. Or her version of Rod Stewart's virgin-deflowering anthem Tonight's The Night which, with no gender change in the lyrics, had Jackson taking a seemingly calculated dabble in lesbian chic. Reviews were mixed.

"I don't think they were expecting it at all because it was completely different from the stuff I had done in the past," reflects Jackson about the album's slow acceptance.

"I think it did catch them truly off guard but like I said it's something that I really needed to do for me. I really needed to do this ..."

Might not the allusions to bondage, lesbianism, or heck, reminding us of an old swinger like Rod in his glory days, be seen as premeditatedly attention-getting?

"No the funny thing about that is that if I want to get attention that's very easy to do. I could work into a store right in front of a camera and have sex with someone and be in very paper ... that's very easy to do. I always write about what I am feeling. If I am feeling very sexual at some point I write about it. What bothered me about that is all these people talked about this S&M thing. If people are into that I think that's totally fine because I am not into that, but there are certain things I find very sexy and that is solely what I sing about."

Has Rod rung and thanked you for the royalties?

"Actually no, a friend of mine cuts his hair ..."

You know the person responsible for that haircut?

"Heh heh heh. Yeah and he told me he really enjoyed the remake and at his concert not that long ago after doing Tonight's the Night he said 'that's an original song by Janet Jackson'. But that song has been in me since I was a kid because it's one of my all time favourites. Not truly knowing what I was singing about but how can you not love that melody?"

We head back to the more personal aspects of the Velvet Rope. It's one thing recording the likes of What About - an anthemic song bristling with the howl of a domestic violence victim and also owing something to Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know - and other such cathartic tunes dealing with her peculiar set of growing pains. But it's quite another go and perform them to thousands every week. How many times can the same demons be exorcised?

"Um. It's not necessarily about doing it in front of so many people. It's about what you are feeling at that moment and there are times I am really cool with it and it's fine and we are performing and there are other times I feel that shit just happened yesterday and that is when it gets tough.

"With What About sometimes I am fine with it and it was tough writing it, I had a hard time singing it because I was overcome with a lot of emotion and I had to walk away and come back the next day and try all over again. And with doing it in the show most of the time I am cool but once in a while it will be as if it just happened just yesterday and I am telling somebody about it and that is the part that is tough."

To lighten the mood I suggest the song's closing line, which, roughly translated, has a man saying he hadn't actually had sex with a woman who wasn't his wife but had only received oral pleasure from her, had a certain ring about it.

"President Clinton? People have said that to me. They say 'this is his song' ..."

Can't avoid the political with the personal huh?

"Exactly right. It's really funny that it's with Clinton this time. On the last album, the janet album there was a song that I did called This Time and that was when the whole OJ and Nicole Simpson thing was happening and This Time is about domestic violence - I thought I had got that out of my system and I had freed myself of that but I realised that I didn't and felt this strong urge to write What About. Everyone was talking about that song being about [OJ and Nicole] at that time."

Of course, the Jackson name is never away from unwanted headlines either. How does she regard these days the name which gave her that showbiz destiny -- as a blessing or a burden?

"At this point I don't know," she ponders. "If something is on the news about one of us and it's a negative it's like the finger is pointed at all of us and we all feel the effects. That's very painful because we are all individuals.
"People tend to do that with a family and I've definitely felt that a great deal in my entire career. But what can you do?"

Indeed. And this is a woman who can't remember a time while growing up before her siblings were already so famous they were a cartoon show. Some might say that one would have preferred his life stay a cartoon. But it's curiously fascinating to hear Jackson recount the memories of one funky, weird childhood.

"I was two years old. When I see the words 'two years old' I remember Sly and Family Stone's Hot Fun in the Summertime - that is one of my all time favourite songs I remember living in Beverly Hills and my brothers being famous. I don't remember a house in Indiana. I do remember a couple of my friends - Courtney and Gregory in Indiana - at a such age having boyfriends already. Ha!"

You start taking this wander down memory lane you get a picture, not necessarily of the famously dysfunctional showbiz family but of a house pumping with noise and doings thing to the musical DNA of the youngest who was to eventually become the clan's most musically adventurous member.

"What I grew up with, aside from Motown, because there were so many kids in the family there was different types of music going on. I used to share a room with my sister LaToya and she was a classical nut. She was into Paganini Stravinksy and I feel in love with it. So I learned a little bit about classical music and grew to have this appreciation for it. Another family member was into Sly and all the funky stuff, P-funk. My brother Randy loved folk music like Joni Mitchell and that is where I heard her work. I had another brother who was into Led Zeppelin - Oh my God! - I remember AC/DC, Kansas, Kiss ....

"When I was about 14 I started getting into jazz -- Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz and then Brazillian jazz. And given all of this and my mother being into country and blues and Muddy Waters I think that is where my music truly comes from. Besides from Motown and Marvin Gaye was such a big inspiration and Stevie Wonder..."

Predictably, Michael has always been an influence: "Oh a great deal. I remember when he was making Off The Wall or Thriller even and I remember playing the album for me when he completed it in his car...and I thought it was the most incredible thing I had ever heard. So awesome. And all of my brothers have been a great inspiration to me. Especially the stuff from the Triumph album or the Jacksons album."

Ever stopped in the studio and thought no, that sounds too much like Michael?: "Yes singing wise on certain things like [Velvet Rope track] You. I actually re-sang it because the first time it sounded very like him. On What About some of the stuff at the end sounds like him and I guess that's inevitable being brother and sister."

Siblings yes but seemingly a world apart in terms of ability to cope in the real world. How did she turn out so well-adjusted?

"I think I'm just really one of the fortunate ones. I really do... and it's from things that I have seen around me - that's what to do and what not to do.

"And my friends I don't have very many but the friends I do have I've had for a very long time and they help to keep me grounded. I know a lot of people in this business but as far as having a lot of friends and entertaining those friends I don't. Most of my friends are dancers or work at a coffee shop or hairdresser's. People that have regular nine-to-five jobs."

But being Janet Jackson isn't a regular nine-to-five job, especially on stage. How long before a hard day at the office is just too hard?

"I don't know. I love music I don't think I'll be touring like the Rolling Stones at fiftysomething but doing other things at that point in my life. Maybe once in a blue moon just to satisfy my own little selfish needs to get out there.

"I am definitely going to do another album. I don't know about another tour and I say that with all honesty because there is a lot more I want to do."

But right now she has another selfish need to get out there - to go music shopping for the new album by Afrocentric rappers A Tribe Called Qwest, she says. Unless of course she's about to try out her theory about how to get into every newspaper ...

- Weekend TimeOut, 05/12/98

PICTURED: Janet Jackson