Rhythm Nation 1814, Janet Jackson’s magnum opus and blockbuster follow-up to her 1986 breakthrough album Control, celebrates its 25th anniversary this week. In looking back at the towering achievement, steered by superproducers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, it may be easy to miss how far ahead of the pop pack this album was at the time. But Rhythm Nation proved that the success of its predecessor was no fluke, that Janet was more than just Michael Jackson’s little sister, and that she had taken a quantum leap forward.
And in doing so she passed both her big brother and the biggest pop diva of the time, Madonna.
Before you write angry emails, let me clarify that statement.
Janet was not the prodigious talent that Michael Jackson was. He was a much better singer, an otherworldly performer and an actual songwriter. He was undeniably the biggest star of his era. As for Madonna, she was a master of media manipulation and reinvention, who churned out some of the most indelible pop singles of the era. But with Rhythm Nation, Janet Jackson delivered an album that was far more ambitious than any LP Michael or Madonna had produced up to that point; much more thematically and sonically cohesive than their contemporaneous releases, Bad and Like A Prayer.
A decade removed from Off the Wall and the biggest pop star in the universe, Michael had never attempted a concept album like Rhythm Nation; and even his best albums (Off the Wall and Thriller, in case that needed pointing out) were never quite the perfect long players that Janet’s late 80’s albums were. Does anyone really love “The Girl Is Mine”? Bad was MJ’s first album of the CD era, and it included more songs than his previous two classics. He wrote almost the entire album, but the extra space only meant more filler: tracks like “Just Good Friends” and “Speed Demon” would’ve never made it onto Thriller. The “worst” songs on Rhythm Nation 1814 stand head and shoulders above the worst tracks on Bad. And even most of the best songs–go back and listen to the respective title tracks on each album. You tell me which is a better song.
As far as Madonna, she was never quite the album-maker that Janet Jackson had proven herself to be alongside Jam and Lewis. Her best 80’s album, Like A Prayer, can’t really be held higher than Rhythm Nation or Control. She and Patrick Leonard made magic together, but …Prayer still has a tremendous amount of filler and its conceptualism is much more implied than actualized. Rhythm Nation is as cohesive as the concept albums of the early 70s were. Madonna’s greatest strength lies in her hit singles, more so than her albums. Jam and Lewis may have done much of the heavy lifting, but you always felt like you were getting Janet’s vision and perspective on her albums. Especially on Rhythm Nation.
Social commentary was driving hip-hop at the time of Rhythm Nation 1814, and Janet showed herself more in tune with that genre and culture than any major pop star had been thus far. It could be argued that on Control, Jam & Lewis laid the foundation for New Jack Swing (though no one called it that yet), and on Rhythm Nation, they expanded the style’s artistic possibilities. The dance-heavy beats and thundering production gave a certain heft to the socio-political musings throughout the record, giving a certain grounding in reality that made Michael’s work with “We Are the World” four years earlier seem mawkish and banal.
We are conditioned to think of the 80s pop trifecta of Michael, Madonna and Prince as the “Holy Trinity” of post-disco pop stars; but in 1989, Janet elbowed her way to the front of the pack. She wasn’t as otherworldly as Michael, as mass-marketed as Madonna or as artistically gifted as Prince; but she released the last truly great album of the 80s and proved that she was didn’t have to take a backseat to any of them anymore. And she trumped two of the biggest stars of her era with an album that has aged better than some of their best work.
