Baby sister Janet set her sweet little girl image on fire with the release of “If.”
As she grew into her own woman, Janet started ridding herself of all sorts of constraints placed on her by men. After her second album was released in 1984, she promptly fired her famously abusive manager father who insisted she only call him by his first name. A street harassment incident inspired the “take no shit” attitude behind her third album, Control. Janet told Rolling Stone, “a couple of guys started stalking me on the street and instead of running.. for protection, I took a stand. I backed them down. That’s how songs like ‘Nasty’ and ‘What Have You Done for Me Lately?’ were born, out of a sense of self-defense.”
So you can imagine that by her FIFTH album, the self-titled “janet.”, she’d definitely come into her own. And the world LOVED the new empowered and overtly sensual Janet, launching her album straight to the top of the Billboard charts where it essentially stayed with SIX #1 singles, making her one of only seven musicians in history to achieve such a feat.
By this point, Janet had also starred in John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice” with Tupac Shakur, and become an Academy Award nominee with her Best Original Song, the sticky sweet and tearful “Again.” So the fuzzy rock guitar, trip-hop break down, strip-club ready choreography, and barely veiled innuendos of “If” were a total departure from the tender Janet we’d grown up with. She’d always had a sweet sexiness about her, but this Janet gleefully and brazenly flaunted it, and encouraged us to do the same. Set in an underground Asian club, complete with secret passwords and beautifully tattooed women, Janet makes what I’m certain is the best video entrance of all time, and then proceeds to describe and simulate all sorts of sex acts on the club’s stage. In fact, while filming, she repeatedly gushed how glad she was that her mother wasn’t there.
In our Digital Age, the surveillance, touchscreens and screen voyeurism depicted in “If” almost seem like second nature, so let me remind you, this was released in 1993 before a lot of the technology depicted here was available to consumers. But for those of you who’d rather skip all that stuff and the storyline, there’s a second version of the video that’s strictly choreography linked in the comments. Most of us never saw that version because it was deemed too hot for television. And to think, all this time, Miss Jackson had us believing we were the nasty ones.
𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗦 𝗧𝗢 𝗟𝗢𝗩𝗘:
“Sittin’ over here, starin’ in your face
With lust in my eyes, sure don’t give a damn”