Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - State of the World Edition

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History,

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2019

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the mid-1980s, Janet Jackson broke away from her world-famous, hit-making family and, with her Control album, rebooted both her career and pop style in the New Jack Swing era. The challenge was following it up—and Jackson and her producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, didn’t make it easy on themselves.

In 1989, they produced an ambitious album with a portentous title: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. But what could have been Control, Part 2 instead was a visionary LP that reinvented the socially conscious album from the era of Marvin Gaye for the ’90s, and envisioned what pop would eventually sound like in the 21st century. Rhythm Nation was a smash, generating more hits—and bigger hits—than any album in history. In fact, if Jackson and her label hadn’t pulled their punches with one final radio single, she could have set an all-time Billboard chart record that would have overshadowed any of the Jackson family’s historic achievements.

Podcast production by Chris Berube.

HostChris Molanphy

Follow @cmolanphy on Twitter / https://www.twitter.com/cmolanphy

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music.
0:14.7	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast.
0:22.2	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number
0:27.4	One series?
0:34.1	On today's show, 30 years ago this month, in September 1989,
0:40.5	some of popular music's biggest superstars were coming back with highly anticipated albums
0:46.4	that had been years in the making.
0:48.7	You're not the only one with mixed in all. Hitmakers from the world, hard rock and hard rock were all lining up to dominate the
1:08.0	1989 holiday season with LPs destined for multi-platinum sales.
1:17.6	Yet all of these comebacks by rock veterans were outdistanced on the charts by a 23-year-old woman whose new album was arguably the most ambitious.
1:29.9	She had rebooted her career in the mid-1980s, and now she felt she needed to reinvent it again.
2:04.1	Janet Cheney. Janet Jackson's 1989 album, whose full verbose title was Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 was a mega blockbuster, and it did not have to be as ambitious as it was. Rhythm Nation was following a hugely successful prior album, Janet's hit-packed 1986 Smash Control. And between
2:12.3	her late 80s momentum and her well-known family name, whatever Jackson put out next was likely to sell strongly.
2:20.8	But Rhythm Nation did a whole lot more than that.
2:32.8	A watershed in pop, Rhythm Nation bridged the music of the 80s and 90s and such genres as New Jack Swing, hip-hop, lush soul, and even hard rock.
2:50.4	It was also a hit-to-to-to-to-time. It was also a hit machine.
2:55.5	Rhythm Nation went toe-to-toe with some of the biggest albums of the decade.
3:01.5	Let me take you on and escapade.
3:04.4	Let's go.
3:05.3	We'll have a good time. We'll have a good time. It both opened and closed with a number one hit, four chart-toppers in all.
3:17.7	Its hits spanned three calendar years, the only album to achieve this feat.
3:23.2	It tied the record for most top 10 hits from a single
	...

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