How Janet Jackson took 'Control' in Minneapolis with Jam and Lewis
February 04, 2026
Control was released 40 years ago, on February 4, 1986. But the story of Janet Jackson’s breakout begins properly, as so much in pop did, in 1984. Much has been written on Michael Jackson’s tumultuous year. The Jacksons’ Victory Tour, that summer and fall, was a PR boondoggle and his final outing with his brothers. But his baby sister was also having an equally rough and momentous 1984.
Janet Jackson started in showbiz as a small child, performing with the family in Las Vegas and landing regular parts on TV’s Good Times and Diff’rent Strokes before recording her first, self-titled LP in 1982, at age 15, for A&M Records. Early in 1984, she joined the cast of the syndicated musical drama Fame, and shortly afterward, she moved out of her parents’ house.
Largely produced by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Belotte, Janet’s second album, Dream Street, released in September of 1984, was in some ways a family affair. Her brother Marlon produced two tracks, including the first single, “You Don’t Stand Another Chance,” a busy synth-bass electro-funk track whose staccato chorus prefigures Janet’s later “Miss You Much.” Michael, Jackie, and Tito sang backup on one song; there was even a picture of Janet’s brothers on the inner sleeve.
Janet also did something else that September. She eloped with James DeBarge, a member of another Motown family quintet, DeBarge. This was the most surefire way for a Jackson sibling to leave the enclave: Jermaine was 19 when he wed Hazel Gordy, Berry’s daughter. Four of his siblings were married at 18: Rebbie, Tito, and Marlon—and now Janet.
As People reported, “The [Jackson] brothers were shocked; so were their parents, Katherine and Joe.” Janet would be, too, once she found out that her new husband drank heavily and was addicted to painkillers. People continued: “But no one was more shocked, or alarmed, than A&M record executive John McClain, who feared the marriage would torpedo Janet’s fledgling career.” McClain, the report went on, would spend more than half a year “hounding” Jackson to get an annulment. “I tried to convince her that she’s a teen idol and people just wouldn’t accept it,” McClain said. “Hey — I’m trying to make her a star!”
Janet would refute this: “When I was going through my problems with James, I would talk to John on the phone; he was always there for me and very supportive, but that story is not true.” She added: “I was sheltered, and there’s good and bad to that. The good was not getting into the drugs and the alcohol ... and the bad was finally coming out into the real world and trying to deal with it, which was hard for me. My first time dealing with all that was when I was on Fame and when I got married. They were at the same time.”
The marriage was annulled after eight months, but the message was clear — Janet intended to be her own woman. Dream Street sold bubkes — despite it containing an icky, immediately forgotten duet with the has-been British crooner Cliff Richard that, for some reason, was released as a single. Janet was also determined to get serious about her music. When Michael— the brother she was closest to — went nova with Thriller, Janet had snapped, “You make me sick. I wish that were my album.” When she flew to Minneapolis in the summer of 1985, she would get her wish, her way.
Working with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis from the Time wasn’t Janet’s idea. And though he had brokered the deal, the idea didn’t come from John McClain, either. When another collaboration (with Sharon Bryant of Atlantic Starr) fell through, McClain had given the writer-producers their pick of the roster, and they chose Janet. They’d watched her on TV, seen her perform with her brothers, and they noticed something her family and hired hands either had not, or had simply ignored — Janet had attitude, and that was what made her interesting.
Famously, when Janet came to Minneapolis to record, she was a classic fish out of water—expecting a limo to pick her up rather than Jimmy Jam in his car. (Her luggage, as well as that of her accompanying friend, Melanie Andrews, spilled out of the trunk into the backseat.) She had never really been on her own before, and the producers were taking notes, gleaning the album’s themes by listening carefully. When Janet got huffy at some dinks trying to put the moves on her at a mall, the three of them shaped the confrontation into the song “Nasty.” Janet wanted to be her own woman, working on her own terms, not her parents’ puppet; out popped “Control.”
Jimmy Jam, that consummate professional, always couched this album in terms of serving the client’s needs. Speaking to Musician in 1986, he contrasted this gig with another they’d done before it: “Cherrelle had no particular statement to make, but she’s a fun, energetic person, so we tried to capture that on her album. But Janet did have one to make, so we went for that.” A year later, to Rolling Stone, Jam was even more succinct: “Janet was like a stick of dynamite. We lit the fuse.”
But Janet lit theirs, too. Jam and Lewis’ work had always been bold, but Control is downright imperial. On the big hits, especially, the music is very busy, particularly Lewis’ knotted, strutting bass lines. But it isn’t a din; nothing gets lost. Listening again, it’s striking just how much industrial clang is in these grooves. “Nasty,” in particular, is rife with both anvil-like percussion and Phil Collins-style “gated” snares, with their abruptly foreshortened room echo, each hit alternately spraying into the next and leaving sudden, exciting gaps in the sound. As the critic Lesley Chow notes in her chapter on Janet in the book You’re History, “The beats suspend your arms, poised to lash or defend, while locking the knees in an alert stance.”
Janet’s relatively mild pipes came in for lots of criticism at the time (and afterward), but her ughs, whoops, asides (“I like this part”), announcements (“Who’s right?”), and confrontational tail-offs (“don’t mean a thing-ah!”) add more than mere coloratura. As Lesley Chow noted, “Janet has a torn, raw, ‘wet’ voice, ideal for expressing the wariness of an outsider, as well as the sexual urgency of her later albums.” Not only is Janet unafraid to sound ugly at times, she clearly relishes it. No surprise that she exulted over David Cronenberg’s The Fly in an interview promoting Control. “I thought it was disgusting, but that’s what I liked about it,” she told Smash Hits in 1987. Who’s that thinking nasty thoughts?
The producers had Janet play some of the keyboard parts on the album—not because she was the only option, per se, but to “involve her as much as possible,” as Jam put it. It worked: Janet would credit them for “allow[ing] me to think of myself as a musician, and not just as a singer.” That intertwined collaboration is inherent to the album’s appeal—it’s clearly the work of a unified front. That sense of unbridled fun comes out all over the album, like the Mad Libs call-and-response of “Nasty.”
That’s the case even with the selection Jam and Lewis didn’t work on: “The Pleasure Principle,” written and co-produced by their old Time-mate Monte Moir. Though Control’s singles ruled dance floors for at least two years, “The Pleasure Principle” was Control’s most forwardly dance-oriented track—especially in its absurdly kinetic Shep Pettibone 12-inch remix. And dance was the orientation of the videos Jackson made for the album—choreographed by the young Paula Abdul, whose Forever Your Girl was also largely produced in Minneapolis a few years later.
The “Principle” video features Janet basically dancing her way through a warehouse (presumably in North Minneapolis). A lot happens, but what sticks is a kind of Chekhov’s gun—if you introduce an object in the first act, you must use it by the third. Call it Chekhov’s chair: sitting on the warehouse’s dance floor, looming in the center of a zooming crane shot, invitingly still, almost demanding to be toppled in slow motion. As Janet promises on another Control song, it’s worth the wait.
Control defined the late ’80s as much as Thriller had defined the decade’s middle. When Thriller caught fire in early 1983, it didn’t just usher in more Black hits—pop radio in the early ’80s had been the whitest since the days before rock ‘n’ roll. It also upped the stakes for album sales in general. A million copies would no longer be the definition of a smash album. In December of 1984, the RIAA introduced a new sales award, multiplatinum (two million sold), to go along with its platinum (one million) and gold (500,000) certifications. Control remains a standard bearer of the period. The album went multiplatinum after six months, selling three million by December of 1986; by now it’s well over 10 million.
The story of Control isn’t only about Janet Jackson’s emancipation or Jam and Lewis’s mainstream triumph. In the mid-’80s, that kind of mass success for a Black artist typically followed a please-all-types approach, following Thriller’s hit-for-every-radio-format blueprint. It’s not that Control didn’t please many demographics—“When I Think of You” is perfect caramel-centered pop, “Let’s Wait Awhile” an instant Quiet Storm standard.
But the album never wavers for a second from its mission—which, as Jimmy Jam told Rolling Stone, was “to do an album that would be in every Black home in America. We were going for the Black album of all time—gritty, raw.” Control heralded the bold new direction that Black music took in the late ’80s, especially hip-hop and new jack swing. Janet’s album wasn’t really any of those things. It didn’t have to be, because it hit just as hard. This wasn’t your parents’ R&B. Or, for that matter, your older brother’s.
