Listening Back to When Janet Jackson was for lovers

Dear listeners,

As the senior staff editor for the Arts & Leisure section, I’m often lost in a big profile. The kind that makes you consider the arc of a career, its slopes, its peaks, and its inevitable chasms. And because so much of my life has been organized around music — I was 6 when I first bounced into the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music for voice and theory instruction — the contours of a pop life have always been particularly fascinating to me.

There’s a Janet Jackson video that I’ve been thinking about a lot, one that captures her at a moment of metamorphosis. It opens on a warmly lit loft, where Jackson’s dancers, playing themselves, are playfully trying to coax her into handing over the cassette (it’s 1993!) that houses the lead single from her new album. After a false start, it begins. “That’s the Way Love Goes” sounds like sweaty bodies and basement parties, a song in the key of pleasure seeking. It was considered a sonic departure for an artist who, just shy of 27, had prized discipline, control.

For the vérité-style video, directed by her partner at the time, René Elizondo Jr., Jackson re-emerged beaming: her skin coppertone, hair a cascade of crinkly waves (not a military cap in sight) — and emitting what I understand now as the aura of a woman who’s given herself permission. In an interview that year with The Los Angeles Times, she described her approach to making the album, titled simply, “Janet.”: “I finally just started writing down all my feelings about love,” she said, “making love, falling in love, falling out of love, everything.”

And with that, she ushered in what I can only call the Pleasure Era. Here, my favorites — with a few flirtations from other moments in her catalog.

It’s always a summer of love,

Rebecca

Listen along while you read.

1. “That’s the Way Love Goes”

As she had for her two blockbuster albums, “Control” (1986) and “Rhythm Nation 1814” (1989), Jackson turned again to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the Minneapolis maestros, for her next offering. The track begins with a tease spoken over a shimmery, layered intro: “Like a moth to a flame burned by the fire / My love is blind, can’t you see my desire?” Though executives at Jackson’s new label, Virgin, were angling for “If,” a kinetic dance track drowning in distortion, the artist and her producers knew this one had to go first. Its subtlety, Lewis has said in interviews, would be the surprise. The trio had it right: The eventual Grammy winner for best R&B song spent eight weeks at No. 1 beginning in April 1993, and proved that in the right hands, a couple of James Brown samples could still feel fresh.

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2. “Any Time, Any Place”

Nobody does whisper-soft seduction like Janet in the ’90s. Kendrick Lamar would probably agree. His relationship anthem “Poetic Justice,” featuring a Toronto rapper who shall not be named, reaches back to interpolate this bedroom burner. “Poetic Justice,” of course, pays homage to the beloved John Singleton film of the same name, in which Jackson starred as the heartbroken hairstylist Justice, opposite Tupac Shakur. But back to the source material: The song drifts by on well-timed hand-snaps, and its voyeuristic visual, with those close-ups of sinewy spines, is positively cinematic.

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3. “The Body That Loves You”

“These are the hands that’ll touch you / These are the lips that’ll kiss you / These are the arms that’ll hold you / So come get the body that loves you.” I imagine this “Janet.” deep cut, with its spare instrumentation, as the soundtrack for that indelible Rolling Stone cover shot by Patrick Demarchelier. Published a few months after the album release, it features Jackson in a pair of casually unbuttoned jeans, and in place of a top, a carefully placed pair … of hands.

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4. “Got ’Til It’s Gone”

Three years after they played star-crossed lovers in “Poetic Justice,” Jackson and Q-Tip reunited for this midtempo ballad from the artistic breakthrough that was “The Velvet Rope,” Jackson’s 1997 album. It’s a song about regret — Janet practically weeps the lyric “How’d I ever let you get away?” — that sails over a Joni Mitchell sample and a scathing dressing down from Tip, but it somehow manages to feel like a second chance isn’t out of the question.

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5. “Love Will Never Do (Without You)”

If you’ve ever been in love, you’ll know this is what that first flush of euphoria sounds like. The chorus builds as if it were engineered to be sung from stadiums. The production, with that insistent bass line, is classic Jam & Lewis. It was a “Rhythm Nation” single, but its energy resembles little else on that decade-closing album. Herb Ritts, the storied fashion photographer, crafted a timeless video for it — a Vogue spread come to life. As Janet and her two admirers dance on a deserted beach, you can almost see the magazine copy: “They said it wouldn’t last / We had to prove them wrong / ’Cause I learned in the past, that love would never do without you.” It’s nothing short of an artifact from a golden era of music video.

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6. “Twenty Foreplay”

In 1995, Jackson was taking a victory lap. This was one of two new songs from her greatest hits album, “Design of a Decade, 1986-1996.” It opens with birdsong — ’90s R&B loved a sound from the natural world — and packs so much tension into its starts and stops. Jackson gives a sensual vocal performance, elongating vowels or suddenly quickening the tempo for an urgent query (“Do you want the blindfold?”).

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