Post by Marc Larcher April 11, 2022
How to get out of poverty and violence
It took a documentary series of four episodes to tell the hallucinating life of Janet Jackson, artist with 180 million albums sold and five Grammy Awards. First of all, the first episode is careful to dwell on what it means to grow up in the Jackson family when you are the ninth and last child of the siblings. Live at eleven in a 62 m2 house in the city of Gary, Indiana, one of the poorest and most violent in the United States. Fortunately, their mother spotted their talent for music and Joe, the father, a tough guy who works in a steel mill, decided to exploit it to get by. A few hundred kilometers away sit the famous Motown studios, which are not yet the center of gravity of the music industry. Faced with their first edition, Berry Gordy, the boss of the label, also spotted the vein. Janet will therefore grow up in the shadow of the most famous group since the Beatles before going on stage at the age of 7.
A takeover of his destiny
The father, a manager who wants to control everything, decides, as she explains, everything about their life. Janet wants to go to college, he forces her to sing. The only solution: marriage to escape paternal influence and beatings. Out of luck, her young husband, James DeBarge, takes drugs and the celebrity press accuses him of hiding the fruit of their union. She pursues an acting career, notably in the “Fame” series about a dance school in New York. She will be the first in the family not to allow herself to be dominated by her father and to launch her career as a solo singer as she sees fit. The album will be called and it is not a coincidence: “Control” and will go around the world.
Over the episodes, we discover that this struggle between his personal expression and family, industrial and pressures will never end. Not to mention the pressure she exerts on herself to try to compete or even surpass her brothers, and the first of them, Michael, the biggest music star of the 20th century. The documentary is full of anecdotes such as that of David Bowie arriving at the family’s Californian house and offering drugs to his siblings, that of Paula Abdul, her choreographer laughing at the carpet in her white room, or the first signs of empowerment, a fashionable feminist term thirty-five years later.
The huge shadow of Brother Michael
His success, we discover, will go crescendo, 6 million albums for “Control”, then even more for “Rhythm Nation” and “Janet”, and even a first role in the cinema in “Poetic Justice” alongside of… Tupac. In the same way, she gradually builds an increasingly sexy image. However, on all the archive images, the singer remains shy, discreet as if she were aware that this whole building could collapse at any time. Like during the Super-Bowl scandal with Justin Timberlake. Especially since the shadow of her big brother will never stop covering her even in the very scandals in which he is involved. In the end, despite the testimonies of a good half of American show biz, there is still a part of mystery to it and that makes it even more precious.
JANET, a documentary series available on CANAL+ Docs