Damita Jo
Janet Jackson
Virgin (EMI)
Rating: *½
This is a thoughtful disc, by which I mean that during the presentation of its synthetic ecstasies any normal person is likely to find his or her thoughts straying to other things. You don't have to be an insider or music journalist to drift toward waking nightmares about the queries that must have circulated in the studios where these studiously horny tracks were put together. Is this sexy enough yet?, they may have asked. Too sexy? Sexy in a good way? That's the clincher, and if you can still bear to hold the words "Jackson" and "sex" in a single thought, you may decide that Janet can still hump a Marshall stack with the best of them. She does not slacken in the attempt. Even her monotone musings about the virtues of clean sand and good books veer quickly back to the action of erogenous bones.
We're told these days that sex is endlessly variable, but the sounds of enervated lust seeping from Jackson's imaginary boudoir are not. It would be hard to find a more tedious celebration of how tab A goes into slot B, outside a porn-film set. "Relax, it's just sex," she murmurs at the end of track three. What can you reply, but: "Oh, is that all?"
Jackson may be the most willfully limited star in pop music. Her vocal range is even more narrow than her subject, rarely rising above a candied whisper or beyond a single octave. Michael Jackson may have failed in his surgical ambition to look like Diana Ross, but his sister has mastered the art of sounding like her. Forty years on, however, Ross's demure invitation to "come see about me" has hardened into Jackson's bleak promise that "I'm a pro, you won't be disappointed."
Another crucial difference is that Ross had Berry Gordy in her corner. Jackson has Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam, gifted producers who reveal no new ideas about how to make their long-time boss sound like a desiring human being. Their best effort comes in I Want You, which has a good loping groove and so much hall-of-mirrors overdubbing that Jackson takes on vocal heft by sheer force of numbers. Other good tracks seem to have been constructed with the perverse aim of pushing the star's erotic disembodiment to the limit. Perverse, because this ain't techno.
The best thing on the disc is the closing single, Just a Little While, a jumping guitar-based number (written with Dallas Austin) that makes you realize just how soporific all the preceding come-ons have been. Maybe somebody finally realized that you could have too much sex after all.