Amena:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER With Amena Brown. Thank you so much for those of you that may just be finding the podcast. So we did a rerun of a few of our favorite episodes over the summer while I was traveling and eating all the peaches and cucumbers because summer is just an amazing season for the fruits and some of the vegetables, but a lot of the fruits. So I hope that you all enjoyed your summertime and had some good and fun times with some people that you love and hope you had some good food too.
Amena:
So during the summer I had the opportunity to attend and work at Essence Festival. And if you're not familiar with Essence Festival, although I know many of you are hopefully, but Essence Festival is it's a massive festival that in a lot of ways centers Black women because Essence Festival is an offshoot of Essence Magazine, which is a magazine that's been around for a very long time that has centered the stories of Black women and Essence Festival is this outgrowth of that. And Essence Festival has concerts, it has exercise and wellness and food and beauty things. It's like if a conference and a concert and a bunch of shopping and some of your favorite Black celebrities all converge in New Orleans for almost a week, basically.
Amena:
So I had the opportunity to be a part of Essence Festival because I was invited to host some game show segments on the Beauty Carnival Stage at Essence. And the Beauty Carnival Stage is the stage that's in this area where a lot of beauty brands are there that the people who are attending us Essence Festival can come and get to know more about some of the brands that were there. And of course, there are all sorts of vendors selling clothes and earrings. And then there are other brands that may not necessarily be beauty-related, but maybe health-related or food-related that will also be in some of those areas.
Amena:
So I was here on this stage that didn't have performances, but obviously had games and game shows that were there, as well as interviews and panel discussions and stuff like this. So I was very excited because I have wanted to get a chance to perform or be on stage at Essence Festival for a really long time. So to get invited was a big deal to me and to get a chance to see how it works because I have never even just attended Essence Festival. I've had a couple of times that some girlfriends were going and they invited me to go and I couldn't go for various reasons. And then I was planning on going with one of my best friends for my 40th, but my 40th happened to fall in 2020. And so that meant that I could not go to Essence Festival because of the pandemic, whomp, whomp, whomp.
Amena:
So all that to say, I was very excited to get a chance to finally just be there for Essence Festival and to have the opportunity to work Essence Festival, which I was like, I would love to just attend Essence, but if I could get booked for Essence, I would love to be doing one of two things. I would love to either be performing my poetry or I would love to be hosting in some capacity. So to get the chance to host game show segments on the Beauty Carnival Stage was amazing.
Amena:
I'm putting it out there y'all that I hope in the future, I'll be able to come back to you all and tell you about the times that I performed poetry there and got a chance to do even more hosting. I would love to do that. And just so happens that this year's Essence Festival, Janet Jackson was headlining the Saturday night concert. And that's really what this episode is about. This episode is about Janet Jackson and Janet Jackson deserves more than the minutes I may have to give you in this episode. And if I am saying Janet Jackson's name, and you're not familiar with her music at all or maybe you're familiar with her newer music and you're not familiar with the music from the earlier parts of her career, this is your encouragement to do a deep dive wherever you like to listen to your music, do a deep dive into her music because it will be very well worth it.
Amena:
So I'm going to start you from the beginning of my becoming a fan of Janet Jackson. My first cassette tape, I'm pretty sure I didn't buy it because I was six years old, so my first cassette tape that I can remember having of my own that I could keep in my room and then play in my little whatever tape player I had access to was Janet Jackson's Control, which for me always feels like Janet's first album, but I actually think it was her second album if I remember right.
Amena:
Janet Jackson's Control, the cover of Control is perfect. Those of you that may follow me on social media know that I sometimes like to see if I can figure out how to mimic an album cover. And this album cover for Control is an album that I would love to figure out how I could mimic, except I don't know that my hair would really do what Janet's hair was doing in this cover. And even at six years old, the eighties was an interesting time to be a child because I was allowed to listen to this whole cassette. I was about to say CD, but this whole cassette tape and obviously, there are some things on this cassette that I'm sure a six year old is maybe not ready to hear. There was some very sexy songs, at least one sexy song I can remember at the end of this album that I'm sure a six year old wasn't ready for it, but I really have vague memories of that. And more of my memories are of hearing Control and What Have You Done for Me Lately.
Amena:
And this is an interesting time to think about having been listening to this cassette as a six year old because this was also at sort of this beginning era of the music video. And we know that Janet Jackson really just reigned as the queen of a lot of amazing music videos. And so my memories of this music are part me listening to it and part me remembering these videos of Janet, just skipping around with her friends, talking about this boy she likes, that's how I interpreted this at the time.
Amena:
I just loved her music. I loved her. I loved her smile. I loved those black jeans that she wore in the Control video. I loved the mic and the headset. I had very large Janet posters on my wall. I remember for my seventh birthday, I think my mom had gotten me a poster and then I asked for a poster for my seventh birthday. And I also remember having my first ever sleepover with my friends from school. And there were probably, I don't know, maybe there were six or seven of them, maybe it was 10 of us. I don't remember how many of us there were in all. I mean, now as an adult, I'm like, wow, shout out to my mom for doing a sleepover with that many little children, but I remember they came over and they got me all sorts of different little Janet Jackson things that I loved so much because they all knew how much I loved Janet. I'm sure some of them did too.
Amena:
And it just meant a lot to a little Black girl to see Janet Jackson, to see her hips and her cheekbones and to see her dancing and in a lot of ways that I don't think I reflected on until I got older, seeing her really take control of her music and of her life. And that was a very powerful image to young me. Okay, so then I went on to not only be a person that had her magazine cutouts and posters on my wall. Some of y'all are going to listen to this and be like, what? Back in the day because there was no Twitter, there was no TikTok, there was no Instagram, no Facebook, there was no online way that you could talk to artists that you were fans of, but a lot of big artists back then had fan clubs and they had mailing addresses for their fan clubs.
Amena:
So some artists had their stuff organized enough that maybe there were regional meetings where you could meet other people. I never had that experience. But back in the day when you would buy someone's cassette or CD, I don't know about album because I only remember having one or two albums as a child and then went my whole adult life and then got into my thirties and started buying all the albums again, so I don't know how all of that was actually because by the time I was old enough to buy my own music and read the liner notes and all that, I was really buying cassettes and CDs. But inside the cassette and the CD, the insert that when you were a big fan of an artist, you'd open up the whole thing and stare at it.
Amena:
That's how I learned a lot of the words to these songs. They would have a little address, if you wanted to send fan mail to this artist, they would have an address. And so Janet's people put that address in her cassette tape. I know I send her at least two letters, school pictures included so that I could tell her how school was going and how much I loved her music, how much her music meant to me. Who knows if she ever read any of them or where they ever went, but it just felt nice to feel like you could send some sort of a letter to her. I mean, I really am just heart-warmed and just touched thinking about my little eight year old self sending Janet my little school pictures in my sweater vest, bless my heart.
Amena:
And then I must have been about, maybe I was about nine or 10 by the time I was listening to Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation. I also had this cassette tape that my mom bought for me and this cassette I remember really specifically because I remember cassettes were either white or they were this taupe kind of color and Rhythm Nation, the cassette was black with white writing and I thought that was amazing. I thought that was the best thing to ever happen to me. I thought it was amazing and Rhythm Nation I really loved because it was so cool to me as a kid to hear this artist I loved taking on this social commentary of the day. I really admired that she did that in Rhythm Nation and quiet as it's kept, there is a Rhythm Nation VHS. I wish that I still owned mine. I don't know what I did with mine, but there was a Rhythm Nation short film and it's interesting.
Amena:
I'm a huge Beyonce fan, as well. And when I think about what Beyonce has done with these ideas of the visual album, what she did with Lemonade, what she did with the visuals that went with the Beyonce album, as well as what she did with the Homecoming images and film that went on to Netflix from the Coachella performance. When you think about that, I know that Beyonce is also a huge Janet fan and these were things that Janet was doing with her music, as well, that Rhythm Nation actually had a short film that went with it. It was 20 or 30 minutes and I actually re-watched it the other day. I'm going to see if we can find the link. I'm hoping the link is still up because someone on YouTube, bless their hearts, found this and put it on YouTube because the VHS is out of print.
Amena:
And if you watch it now you'll look at it now and realize, hmm, some of this, you can see maybe why Janet and her team would not want to put this back on a DVD, but it'll give you a little slice of time and history to see what Janet was doing with this music and how she was able to work with her team to come up with this visual idea. And it just made me feel so empowered. I think that was a part of some really empowered music for a lot of us who were that age, to see her talking about how, I mean, her screaming, yelling, "It's time to give a damn, let's work together." I was like, "I'm ready to work together, girl. What we doing?"
Amena:
Then the other Janet thing that I remember really being important to my developmental years was Janet's video for That's the Way Love Goes. And That's the Way Love Goes is still one of my favorite songs to this day because it just has that opening guitar. I mean, so good. I want to really almost stop the episode and just be like...
Amena:
If we were friends, friends... Y'all are my friends, but if we were friends, friends, I would be like, "Girl, we just have to stop for a second so we can just play the song real quick." But to think about just the sound of that song. Oh, it just sounded so grown and so sexy. It sounded like Janet was making a musical and a soulful statement about not only who she is as an artist, but also who she is as a woman, that she is a woman who's grown as hell now. And she's not that same, like when I was 17, I did what people told me. When she gets into this Janet album era, which is the album that That's the Way Love Goes was on. I remember this music video and this is also interesting for me when I think about sort of my musical experiences growing up because a part of my music experiences were about my experiences, listening to music by myself on my little boombox or listening in my Walkman at the time.
Amena:
But also a lot of that was very connected to music videos too. And this song is no different in that I remember hearing the song, but I most remember seeing this music video with a young JLo, with all of these beautiful people with crop tops and earth tones. I mean, when I watched this music video, as far as I was concerned, this is what adulthood was going to be for me. It's somehow me in this amazing very well designed warehouse-like apartment loft situation. It's my friends and I having some sort of a grown get together and it is somehow intellectual and yet sexy. This is the life I thought was going to be for me. I was like, surely this is going to be my twenties, this video right here. This is it.
Amena:
And the other thing that I didn't listen to intently because I don't remember that I bought this album. I just remember engaging with this music with the videos. Like the video for If that came out, which was mind blowing, watching Janet and these dancers kill it like they were doing. But I was picking up on something that even bringing Beyonce into the conversation, something that I felt was really apparent in Beyonce's Beyonce album, that you're experiencing a woman artist who's also having a bit of a sexual awakening. And I remember also picking up on that of the songs I did listen to on the Janet album.
Amena:
Now, as we will discuss in other episodes. And as I have previously discussed with you all in some previous episodes having been a person that grew up in church that it wasn't that sex was being discussed with me as something that could be good, normal, beautiful, okay. It was definitely, especially as a young person being presented to me as something you need to be very, very afraid of. You need to be very wary of.
Amena:
So I was watching Janet go through this and I was very intrigued that she seemed to be having an awakening, but I was also afraid of it. Afraid of it and afraid to delve anymore deeply into that. So some of her records, I really didn't get into them until many years later that I came back to sort of listen again to this music. So I kind of fell off of listening to her albums after she put out the Velvet Rope and she put out many albums after that.
Amena:
And here I am at Essence Festival in this arena, I think they said there were about 80,000 of us in this arena watching Janet Jackson perform, watching her headline that night. And it was really a beautiful, full circle moment for me.
Amena:
I think, first of all, it's probably the largest kind of live concert thing that I've been to since the pandemic and prior to the pandemic I am a person and my husband and I both just as a couple, we love to go to live shows. For me as a writer, as a performer live music is just so inspiring to me, especially when it's an artist that you know, and love and you've listened to their music in and out. And then you can see the things that they're doing with their band and DJ and dancers and whatever kind of setup they have. It's always a beautiful, inspiring experience. It is always something that has an element of feeling a bit sacred for me, and to just sit there and number one, hear these hits of hers that I have loved and hear her voice singing that live, watching her dance with her dancers and kill it and watching her do some of the dance routines that were so familiar that I remember many of us this was before there was YouTube or anything.
Amena:
So if you really wanted to learn one of these dance routines from Rhythm Nation or from If, or from Pleasure Principle, the one where she was doing the dance routine with the chair and all that. If you really wanted to learn that stuff, you sometimes had to literally wait for the video to come on, over and over, you had to watch with your friends and call your friends on the phone and tell them, "Okay, okay, okay, it's on." And you watch and learn all things. So to see her doing some of those dance steps that just become so signature to that music for me was amazing. I think also I just, honestly, y'all had a really emotional moment of reflection because personally, this hasn't been an easy year.
Amena:
There have been some hard things that have gone on this year and to, I'm trying to explain this to y'all, and those of you that are listening that may be going through something really difficult right now, or you remember a season in your life where you went through something really difficult how you can go through something that is so difficult. And for many of us that is so traumatizing that you almost feel like your life becomes that. If it was a loss that you experienced, if it was violence that you experienced, it becomes so life shattering that you can just feel like that's now my life that's now what I am or who I am.
Amena:
And there was something about sitting there and watching Janet Jackson perform and thinking about my little six year old self who just loved her, just loved her and finally after all these years getting to see her live. And in a way it helped me to remember, even though I am a person that has experienced some really tough things. I am not just a person that has only experienced that. I'm a person who also has capacity to experience joy and elation and inspiration. I am all of that. And I was reminded of that moving my shoulders to Janet, doing Miss You Much at Essence.
Amena:
And even thinking aging, I've been thinking a lot about that at different points because now being in my forties, it's not that being in my forties is old by any means, but in a way it's sort of like there's a certain point to which you may have imagined your life. And when I was in my twenties, I could sort of imagine myself at 40, but that's kind of as far as I stopped, because if I got into fifties and sixties and seventies and I was starting to get maybe in the age range of my parents or in the age range of my grandparents and I just really could not imagine my life any further than that.
Amena:
So in some ways now actually being in my forties and realizing, oh, my young self only could imagine my life to a point. And now I'm kind of in the part of my life where I get the opportunity to imagine for myself now what do I want this decade of my life or this next 20 or 30 years or 40 years, or however, what do I want for my life? What do I want that to look like? And looking at Janet here in her fifties, still doing this thing that she loves, knowing that she too has been through a lot of hard things and experienced her own elements of loss and grief and experienced her life not going the way that maybe she'd hoped or planned and finding ways to still do the music, finding ways to still make music and do what she loved.
Amena:
And me sort of sitting there now in my forties, thinking about what that means in my own life, trying to really see myself as a whole person and getting to see Janet in this era of her life and just being reminded, just because I may get to an era of my life that I hadn't had a chance yet to imagine what that life would be doesn't mean that this isn't a good time to do that for myself to think well, my 20 something self couldn't think wonder what I'll want to be doing when I'm 48? And maybe that's okay at 42, now this is a good time to ask myself those questions. What do I want to be doing at 42? What do I hope for my life to be when I'm in my fifties? How do I want to build towards that? Whether it's financially or creatively even, or in the work that I do.
Amena:
So lots of inspiration from sitting there and watching Janet just kill it. I mean, it was amazing. And I just saw her at Essence Festival and truthfully, if she released some tour dates right now, I'd probably still want to buy a ticket because it was that amazing. So shout out to Janet Jackson, shout out to our first cassette tapes, those of us who remember having our first cassette tapes and shout out to all of the music that we love, that formed us. And I hope as you all are listening that you will remember too, that you are a whole person, how you are not just the things that you've been through. You are not just the hard stuff that you've survived. You are all these things.
Amena:
You're a person who can experience pleasure, joy. You're a person whose heart may have been broken and all of that can be a part of you. All of that can be a part of what you carry with you into the next season of your life. And maybe this is a good time to imagine or reimagine yourself or your next season of life. Maybe life is not turning out like how you thought it was, but that doesn't mean that there could not be good and beautiful life ahead for you.
Amena:
So that's what I hope for myself and that's what I hope for y'all too. An ode to Janet Jackson and to my first cassette tape to the ability to rewind when we need to. Thanks, y'all see y'all next week.
Amena:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.