Watching music videos you loved as a child decades later as an adult gives you a new lens. Janet Jackson won a Grammy for this excellent visual ode to Black beauty long before it was mainstream and popular to do so and I didn’t realize that until this week.
Janet went introspective (and a little dark) for The Velvet Rope and she gave a lot of interviews in the run-up to the release. One was about “Got ’til It’s Gone” where she said she knew she wanted a rapper somewhere on the album, and when “GTIG” came together, Q-Tip’s voice fit perfectly. In the same interview she talked about being a fan of Joni Mitchell and how rap and folk were both poetry set to music, and that’s how two very disparate artists ended up on the same Janet Jackson song. (Janet actually called Joni Mitchell personally and sent a copy of the song to get permission for the sample, after being told Mitchell would never approve it.)
For the music video, Janet went with Mark Romanek (who has more Grammys for Short Form Music Video than anybody else), and she portrays a lounge singer in South Africa during Apartheid. Joni Mitchell — on a television screen — is the only white face in this video. Whiteness only exists in this space as a target of Black revolution, as the last scene ends with bottles being thrown at a Europeans Only sign. With Beyonce set to release Black Is King in a couple of days and all of the press and petulant backlash from Saltine America taking offense at her pro-Blackness, one can only imagine how “GTIG” would be received in this political climate.
Twenty years after The Velvet Rope, people (including me) made note of Janet Jackson’s love letter to the African diaspora with “Made For Now” through the sound and the fashion and the dance sprinkled throughout the video. But really, Janet has always been that girl. We just pay more attention these days.
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