Milestones: All for You by Janet Jackson
After her darkest and most confessional album, Jackson came back grinning, newly single, and talking very specifically about what she wanted done to her body. The pop world didn’t know what to do.
The new millennium was lousy with futurism. Britney Spears had just gone android on “Stronger,” *NSYNC were selling a million copies of No Strings Attached in a day, and Madonna was dipping into French electronica on Music. Pop radio sounded like it was being broadcast from a satellite, all digital hiccups and vocoder gloss. Into that climate walked a different proposition entirely—a record built on a Change sample from 1980, an America guitar lick from 1972, and a Carly Simon interpolation that predated half its audience. Janet Jackson’s seventh album, All for You, ignored all of it. The album dated back fifteen years and asked Jimmy Jam to spin records at a roller rink. Jam had wanted to sample “The Glow of Love” for years, going back to his DJ days, and when the title track finally materialized around that bassline and those strings, it sounded like a Saturday night at a Midwestern skating party in 1983.
Jackson had spent four years away from the studio. She’d toured The Velvet Rope, an album that dealt with depression, domestic violence, and self-harm. She’d quietly ended a nine-year secret marriage to René Elizondo Jr., who sued her for $25 million when the divorce went public. And she’d come back with 605,000 copies sold in a week, a number-one single on every radio format simultaneously, and an album largely about wanting to have sex with people.
The sex language on “Would You Mind” doesn’t trade in innuendo or coyness; Jackson whispers her way through a list of acts—kissing, sucking, tasting, riding—and then asks her partner to come inside her. The song led to the entire album being banned in Singapore after the Publications Appeal Committee ruled that the lyrics were “not acceptable to our society.” Jackson refused to cut it. The clean version of the album, released months later at Walmart, simply removed “Would You Mind” wholesale, as though the song couldn’t be edited down since there was nothing left once you took the sex out. “Love Scene (Ooh Baby)” operates in the same register, Jackson in falsetto over a near-ambient arrangement, describing a physical encounter with the patience of someone who isn’t rushing to a chorus. And “When We Oooo” stacks harmonies on top of each other while she sings about not getting enough. Jackson was 34, single for the first time since she was 24, and she said in interviews that she saw nothing controversial about expressing what most people do in private. “Here I am talking about love and expressing myself in a way I feel at least most of us do in the bedroom,” she told the press, “and it is something so beautiful.”
For all the bedroom material, only two songs on All for You say anything direct about the divorce. “Trust a Try” is the harder one to sit with—Jackson asking whether trust can be rebuilt after someone has broken it, and sounding genuinely uncertain about the answer. Rockwilder produced it, and the track has a metallic edge that makes it sound more combative than its lyrics, which are really just a woman going back and forth with herself about whether effort is worth spending on someone who already burned her. “Truth” runs nearly seven minutes, and Jackson spends most of it talking herself down. She had a career, friends, family before this person; she reminds herself of that. She quotes the Five Stairsteps (“Ooh child, things are gonna get easier”), and it doesn’t sound triumphant. Then there’s “Son of a Gun (I Betcha Think This Song Is About You),” which borrows its title from the Carly Simon hit outright and brings Simon along to re-record her own vocals. Jackson and Simon take turns calling out a vain, greedy man—a “sharp shooter into breakin’ hearts, a baby gigolo, a sex pistol”—and despite press speculation that the target was Elizondo, Jackson said it was about multiple people, and Jam said some of it was about music executives and lawyers.
Jam and Lewis built most of All for You like curators raiding a very specific era. The title track’s “Glow of Love” sample brought Luther Vandross’s early vocal work back into radio rotation twenty-one years after he’d sung it. “Someone to Call My Lover” looped the opening guitar from America’s “Ventura Highway” and, strangely, wove in a phrase from Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” a pairing that sounds absurd on paper but on the song just makes Jackson’s vocal float over an acoustic strum like she’s driving through California with the windows down and no destination.
Rockwilder’s five tracks—”You Ain’t Right,” “Come On Get Up,” “Would You Mind,” “Trust a Try,” and “Feels So Right”—introduced a grittier, hip-hop-adjacent thump that the Jam and Lewis productions don’t bother with. “You Ain’t Right” snaps harder than anything else on the album, Jackson’s voice switching between breathy and robotic while she tells someone off for betraying her. “Come On Get Up” borrows from tribal house in a way that sounds like it belongs in a sweaty club at 2 AM rather than on the same disc as the Satie sample. Rockwilder was the first outside production voice in the Jackson/Jam/Lewis partnership since Control in 1986, and his tracks stand out for sounding dirtier, less polished, more willing to let a drum pattern bruise.
Twenty tracks at 73 minutes, though, and the album starts to repeat itself in the middle. Five interludes—studio banter, whispered conversations, atmospheric filler—pad the tracklist without adding much. The stretch from “When We Oooo” through “Love Scene” through “Would You Mind” clusters three slow, sexually themed songs in a row with similar tempos and the same whispered vocal tone, and by the time “Would You Mind” ends, the midsection has blurred into one long pillow-talk session. “China Love,” with its past-life romance about being an emperor’s daughter in love with a warrior, is an odd and interesting detour, but it’s sandwiched between slow jams that make it hard to find. The back half recovers. “Someone to Call My Lover” is the loosest, most unforced song Jackson ever put on a single—she sounds like she wrote it in the car and kept the first take. “Doesn’t Really Matter,” pulled forward from the Nutty Professor II soundtrack, is pure Y2K pop-R&B, Jackson telling someone their flaws and insecurities don’t register with her. “Better Days” closes things on a note that’s less conclusive than exhausted—she’s been hurt, she’s done crying, the blindfold is off, and she’s choosing to see something else ahead.
All for You is a bloated album that contains a very good shorter one. Cut the interludes, trim the midsection, and the remaining twelve or thirteen songs are a woman in her mid-thirties who just got free and is making exactly the kind of music nobody expected her to make after The Velvet Rope. The title track alone would justify the album—it’s the biggest, most joyful single of Jackson’s career, a song that made every radio format in the country play it in the same week. And when she dips into the divorce on “Trust a Try” or “Truth,” she says what she needs to say and moves on, which is smarter than most breakup albums manage. The problem is simply that there’s too much around those songs—too many interludes, too many mid-tempo tracks with nothing particular to say, too many songs that would have been album cuts on janet. and are album cuts here too, just with more of them. Jackson’s voice and her willingness to say exactly what she means carry the dead weight further than they should have to.
Solid (★★★½☆)