Happy Birthday, Janet Jackson!

May 16th, in addition to being St. Brendan the Navigator's feast day, is also the birthday of one Ms. Janet Damito Jo Jackson, born in Gary, Indiana. In honor of my fellow Hoosier lady, here are a few of my favorite Janet Jackson videos. Today she turns 59.

All-time fave: "If," from janet, the first album I ever bought in CD format. It samples Diana Ross & The Supremes' 1969 hit "Someday We'll Be Together."

In "Alright," the choreography and video styling allude to classic musicals of the 1960s and earlier. It premiered in 1990. In the long-form mv, Black musical pioneers the Nicholas Brothers and Cab Calloway appear. The video also features legendary dancer-actor Cyd Charisse (one of my people, a white Jewish woman). 

Another classic that contains some interesting pop culture cameos is "Nasty," from 1986. It features Paula Abdul and Dennis Franz*. The video was directed by Mary Lambert, who directed several of Madonna's iconic 1980s music videos as well as feature films including Pet Sematary (1989).

*Dennis Franz was also in City of Angels with Andre Braugher.

Jackson's 1989 smash hit album Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 spun off many hit singles, including "Love Will Never Do (Without You)." 

The video features Beninese-American actor Djimon Hounsou. In addition to videos by Jackson, Madonna, Tina Turner, Paula Abdul, and En Vogue, he's also starred in many hit feature films and played Caliban in Julie Taymor's The Tempest (2010). 

Prior to 2012, when the film was scrapped, Hounsou was signed on to play John Milton's self-insert character, the seraph Abdiel, in the Bradley Cooper adaptation of Paradise Lost. (Cooper would have played Lucifer.) 

Jackson's single "Again" from 1993's janet was used in her film with Tupac Shakur, Poetic Justice*, also starring the poetry of Maya Angelou.

*And Clifton Collins Jr., just a little bit.

This is another fun one from janet: "You Want This." It's a playful tease.

"Got 'Til It's Gone," featuring rapper QTip and interpolating Joni Mitchell's rock classic "Big Yellow Taxi," was one of the big hits off of Jackson's 1997 album The Velvet Rope.

Jackson's 2001 hit "Son of a Gun (I Betcha Think This Song Is About You)" does for Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" what "Got 'Til It's Gone" did for "Big Yellow Taxi." These tracks were done with the cooperation of Mitchell and Simon respectively. 

I could go on and on. The Velvet Rope alone has many good singles. "Go Deep" is one; the video was directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who also directed the "1979" video for The Smashing Pumpkins. The song is a super-infectious earworm. I love it.

Janet Jackson is an iconic female singer/songwriter/rock star who uplifts and upholds other women in the music industry. If you like this kind of music, I am once again recommending that you read She’s A Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll (Expanded Second Edition) by Gillian G. Gaar.

'All the Castles Burned:' SERIOUS LITERARY FICTION, But Do We Care?

All the Castles Burned by Michael Nye

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I suppose this is meant to be Literary and Serious, but in all honesty, it doesn't have much of a plot. It's more of a character study of Owen Webb, and he's essentially the same person at 28 that he is at 16. Granted, he's a likable person, and as someone who was also 16 in the 1990s, I can relate to many of his thoughts and actions. But he has very little agency in his own life. Things happen to him and happen around him, but seldom happen because of him.

Perhaps because of this, we read the Climactic Scene secondhand through Owen's mother, and that makes it less than climactic. The ending feels very tacked-on.

The explicitly-stated moral of this character study is that one should always have a mother, because it's the motherless boy who turns out Bad. Even a half-assed mother is better than none, according to Nye's narration. Owen, of course, has no control over the fact that his mother is present and largely functional, despite dabbling in alcoholism. But we're told that this is what allows him to grow up to be, presumably, a pretty decent person.

I like Owen, but I'd rather read about what happens to him in the boxing ring as a grown-up man with grown-up thoughts than secondhand witness what he passively witnesses as a fairly typical adolescent. Owen's teenage problems are very much First World Problems. At no time in the novel is he in any immediate danger, which makes the stakes of his entire story feel quite low.

Michael Nye, please raise the stakes next time.

I won an uncorrected proof of this book from the publisher in a random drawing and was not obligated in any way to review it. 

'90s Cologne-Inspired Candles 

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