Has Janet Jackson been kept in cryogenic suspension since the nineties?
Being a member of the world’s most dysfunctional showbusiness family, one has to consider all possibilities for her time-defying return to the London stage.
At the end of a rapturously received set, the-45-year old breathlessly announced that it has been 13 years since she last performed in the UK, and 27 years since she appeared at the Royal Albert Hall, gasping “I feel so old!”, possibly in an attempt to make her audience feel less self-conscious about their own fading youth. The truth is, Jackson looks and sounds pretty much exactly the same as she has looked and sounded for most of her adult career.
That she has retained vocal tone and physical fitness is impressive, her voice still high, soft and girlish, her body curvy but firm and up to the demands of aerobic workout style dance routines. But a sense of time warp is emphasised by a hugely capable band all too precisely replicating the kind of machine tooled, plastic R’n’B of her Eighties and Nineties hit era. Once the sleek height of urban dance modernity, Jackson’s chunky beats are so precisely date-stamped, the effect is of a nostalgia review, the kind of retro-fix you might expect from a tribute band rather than the artist themselves. Jackson mashes hits together in fast moving Motown-style medleys, each accompanied by cheerful unison dance routines closely simulating her old Paula Abdul choreographed videos. Even the geometric shapes shifting around on big screens look like they have been restored from an earlier era of computer visuals.
There is something strangely reductive about this. Perhaps it is simply the incongruity of seeing this sleek, glitzy Arena style superstar show in the rather stately Victorian setting of the RAH, with everyone on their feet, moving to the beat and clapping enthusiastically, while dry ice pumps out across the stage, and bright spotlights swivel. In her hey day, Jackson was one of the biggest and, in many ways, boldest female pop stars in the world, the only serious rival to Madonna for matching progressive dance beats with super catchy pop and risqué lyrics. But compared to the new generation of divas, the almost excessively multi-talented and eccentrically glamorous likes of Lady GaGa and Beyonce,
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