Janet Jackson Research Paper

Janet Jackson, the baby of the Jackson family, has been known to be one of the most culturally iconic female Pop/R&B singers of the 1980s. Jackson has been a prominent figure in the music industry for over 20 years. She hasn’t been as active in the most recent years but her legacy continues to live on. Janet Jackson, like her brother, Michael, has deeply impacted not only the music industry but society through music alone. Although she has been known for her notably sexual style of music and provocative persona, Jackson has also brought up a number of topics of great interest regarding ongoing struggles that were (and still are) happening in society.

“In his Rolling Stone cover story, journalist David Ritz compared album Rhythm Nation

It was an era of both increased opportunity and poverty, visibility and invisibility. The revolution of the pop-cultural landscape was undeniable. “Crossover” icons like Janet, Michael, Prince, and Whitney shattered racialized narrowcasting on radio, television and film, while hip hop became the most important musical movement since rock and roll. The Cosby Show changed the color of television, as Spike Lee and the New Black Cinema infiltrated Hollywood. Oprah Winfrey began her lead on daytime television, while Arsenio Hall’s hip late-night talk show drew the attention of some of the biggest names in America. By 1989, from Michael Jordan to Eddie Murphy to Tracy Chapman, black popular culture had never been more flagrant in the American mainstream. Over the course of the decade, the black middle and upper class more than doubled and integrated into all aspects of American life, from college campuses to the media to

In spite of such headwind, however, Janet and Madonna became two of the most important female figures of the late 20th century, each providing different versions of feminist empowerment and liberation to a generation of young people coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s. VH1 ranked them No. 1 and No. 2 respectively in their “50 Greatest Women of the Video Era.” On Billboard’s 2013 list of Top Artists in Hot 100 History, Madonna was at No. 2 and Jackson was at No. 7. Over the course of their individual careers, Madonna has 12 No. 1 hits; Janet has 10. Madonna has 38 Top Ten singles; Janet has 27 (placing them both among the top 10 artists of all time). Both, meanwhile, have sold hundreds of millions of albums and impacted American culture in a number of ways. Yet in spite of their alike widespread accomplishments and cultural impact, Janet Jackson remains, by comparison, grossly underappreciated by critics and historians. Walk into a library and try to find a book on the woman, cultural significance, or artistic creations, you honestly won’t find anything. Perform the same search with Madonna, and you will find at least 20 books by key publishers. In the media, back in the 1980s and today, Madonna is perceived as the default character for feminism and of the era (in a 1990 editorial for the New York Times, cultural critic Camille Paglia famously declared her “the future of feminism”).