Janet "Miss" Jackson: POX

i couldn't do this. i don't know enough janet to have ten. its maybe a project i'm working on though. i've been listening to janet and Velvet Rope a lot. On repeat. they feel like mature work. That's the way love goes in particular feels like this song i've never heard before. or at least properly. like a moth to a flame. those liquid samples, every surface overwritten by a warm sensuality. the slowness of the vocal lines pushing against the beat; slow down there's plenty of time. it could all feel so corny, light a few candles, you know what i mean. my love is blind can't you see my desire. but there's a subtlety to her approach that surprises me. i want to put this next to justify my love, i could be wrong but i feel like chronologically this makes sense, with janet though there's no heavy breathing. the signifiers are dissolved into the viscosity of the beat. i think the video is pretty good at explaining it actually, how the sex is absorbed into a particular sociality. its the same here; nothing overt just the intensification of mood over time. it builds by simply continuing. cumulative and accumulative. how the production just wants you to sink into it and how she holds back. she tends to demur stridency i think. i mean this almost bothers me in how its become a means of recuperating a certain style of RnB vocal in the aftermath of Aaliyah's definitive canonisation but it doesn't really matter to me in the end. ,maybe just because the vocals are so good. always hinting, so sly. that austere code of tricks. on Together again she is so fn good. soft on soft. draped around that, really pretty basic, house beat. the sweetness of it, in heaven we will be together. in the context of a particular, historically defined, AIDS discourse, it seems especially touching. the gentle expansiveness of her phrasing, all distant horizons but still so measured. its a contradiction that's hard to unbundle. sticking with the tempo but gesturing beyond it. i don't like the earlier stuff i've heard as much. we are a part of a rhythm nation. such a boring metaphor, i prefer when she's slipping against herself. layered against herself. she's a good house diva though. a firm touch that insists on a kind of physicality without losing sight of its more ethereal dimensions. i mean i guess she can "command a beat" or w/e but i like her more when she's layered but perpetually displaced. soft on soft. that austere code of tricks.

is there a finer way to spend eighteen minutes and fourteen seconds than 'nasty' (cool summer mix) parts 1 and 2 cos i'm saying no tbh

Spending thirty minutes in Herb Alpert's sun room, watching him play his "Nasty" licks.

man, "what'll i do" is TERRIBLE.

Such a roadblock in the middle of that album's forward momentum.

'What'll I Do' is fine in isolation. It's not really a "Janet track", though. It sounds like one of the many not-very-alternative hits on alternative radio ca. 1995.

http://www.avclub.com/article/nasty-women-and-men-give-janet-jackson-post-debate-244579