Janet Jackson's show, filled with two hours of non-stop music and fantastically choreographed dance movements, wowed the audience and proved why she is one of the most popular performers in the world. This was her first concert on the South African leg of her Velvet Rope World Tour, built around her 1977 album, The Velvet Rope. The Velvet Rope Tour, New York City. THE VELVET ROPE TOUR TOURS. Listen free to Janet Jackson – The Velvet Rope (Interlude - Twisted Elegance, Velvet Rope (Featuring Vanessa Mae) and more). 27 tracks (110:13). 'The Velvet Rope' is the sixth studio album by American Dance-pop artist, Janet Jackson. This album was released on October 7, 1997 on Virgin Records. Prior to its debut, Jackson had been at the center of a second high-profile bidding war over her.
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Ayanna Dozier on a tour poster that sparked sexist backlash
During early press for The Velvet Rope, Janet emphasized that a tour would follow the album, leaving the public to anticipate a cornucopia of images and media text that would extend the listener’s experience with the album. While the press were on alert for the tour dates and the promotional images to follow, nothing could have prepared them for the official poster to announce the Spring 1998 tour. The image was shot by her then husband, René Elizondo Jr. for the promotion of the album; images from these sessions would be fully released as part of The Velvet Rope TourBook.
The image in question, features Janet standing with one of her hips curved towards the viewer wearing a black high cut bikini bottom, a black push up bra, with a sheer long sleeve, low cut, single button cardigan, and, of course a nipple ring pierced through the exterior of the fabric to reveal its presence to the viewer. Janet has her trademark velvet rope curls, albeit in a more reddish brown tone than the fire red that was seen in her videos at the time, like “I Get Lonely” and “ Go Deep.” While the press were aghast at the image they had, in fact, seen it before as Janet used the same image for her Vibe magazine cover back in September of 1997. I supposed the swift backlash came from the wide-scale (both in geographic and size) distribution of a tour poster than a magazine cover as The Velvet Rope Tour poster was used for billboards across the world. Many press publications refused to run it and after a few traffic accidents in London, the billboard was taken down. Janet commented on the controversy with extreme irritation in her MTV The Velvet Rope Tour behind the scenes special. She remarked that the censorship participated in a form of gender bias against women who openly expressed and portrayed their sexuality to a larger public.
The censorship of the image, I similarly argue, was not because of the “racy” content but rather the terms in which they were being presented and the body making those terms. In the same year that The Velvet Rope Tour poster was unveiled, Carl’s Jr. had several commercials that turned women eating hamburgers, in various stages of undress, into an analogy for fellatio. And while adverts like this (of which there are many Carl’s Jr related or not) outraged, they were rarely censored. Society is comfortable the promotion of women’s bodies sexually outside of the grounds of their autonomy, when that autonomy is front and centered, the backlash emerges and what was “sexy” is now labeled as “selling themselves.” To be sure, Janet was selling herself, literally. She was using her body to sell her album, to sell her tour about herself.
The condemnation to the image reveals a larger issue in society around women who “sell themselves” in various entertainment industries, from musicians to sex workers. When a woman’s body is sold on behalf of something else it operates under the exchange of women as property. When a woman sells ‘herself’ it ruptures that dynamic and challenges the tenets of a sexual economy by which women can, in turn, profit off a system that atomizes their bodies for profit. To gain the system itself is considered taboo for it reveals the various codes, rules, and ‘conduct’, by which the economy of sex is constructed by and for heteropatriarchal norms. As a comparison, Madonna endured a similar backlash to the provocative visuals that accompanied her sexual-depressive album, Erotica (1992).
Janet’s highly eroticized imagery for The Velvet Rope, including the tour that featured her strapping a fan down to a chair for a lap dance aggressively challenged dominant image productions of women’s sexuality as created for men alone. Here, Janet begin to model sexual agency as an autonomous act rather than one produced under the presumption of the male gaze alone. This archive of accompanying album visuals and performances would inspire other women artists to embrace sexual agency from a point of autonomy rather than visual pleasure for others in their work. I would even argue that Janet’s imagery for The Velvet Rope became the template for artists like Rihanna and F.K.A. Twigs to embrace in their work. Although the tour image was repressed, it lives on. Its presentation of an assertive Janet confronting our respective gazes is a powerful document to the ongoing archive of women’s sexual agency produced outside of the matrix of solely male desire. Images like this and the response to them remind us of perceived danger of shifting our awareness of women’s sexuality as something practiced for men into something practiced for ourselves. While the common rhetoric would argue that we are long past this antiquated idea, I argue that the current socio-political debates around women’s sexual autonomy prove how desperate we are for more cultural documents that model sexuality outside of male desire alone.
Janet Jackson paved the way for other women artists to embrace their sexual agency. Buy your copy of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope to learn more!
'It's my belief that we all have the need to feel special.And it's this need that can bring out the best in us, yet the worst in us.This need created The Velvet Rope.'
TWISTED ELEGANCE
It was January 1996 and Janet Jackson had just signed a multi million-dollar contract with Virgin Records. In current values, she was earning more than 120 million dollars to stick to her record label and was, therefore, again, the highest-paid entertainer in the music market. Being at the peak of her career, Janet had everything to be happy. But she wasn’t. “There’s nothing more depressing than having everything, but still feeling sad”. The words of Interlude: Sad from The Velvet Rope defined how Janet felt. Since 1995, she was very sad – for depression was not the term that she liked to use – for reasons that not even she understood well. The album’s recording process involved a lot of pain.
The pain of facing the wounds of the past, of understanding where this sorrow was coming from, of resolving pending issues. Janet also mentioned meeting a mysterious 50-something cowboy whom she met in a desert, who helped in the process cathartic. Also, at this time, Janet tattooed the Ghanaian Sankofa symbol, which would come to be the symbol of the album. The Sankofa represents the legend of a bird that flew looking back, and means that we must learn from the past to move forward.
You don’t have to hold on to the pain to hold on to the memory.
There’s nothing more depressing than having everything and still feeling sad.
We must learn to water our Spiritual garden.
CAN’T BE STOPPED
In her most experimental album, both in sound and themes, Janet approached taboos, such as: internet relationships, depression, domestic abuse, homo and bisexuality, sadomasochism etc. It was also the longest time she took to record an album to that point. The singer eventually said in interviews that it took about six months to complete the recordings and that due to the weight of her emotions and the content of the album, she several times walked away from the studio for up to a week to “cool off”.
As if the risk she was taking with the content of the album was not enough, the first single was ‘Got ‘ Til It’s Gone’, met with hesitation both by the critics and by some fans. This was not the hit that she hoped for and Janet did not dominate the radio as usual. In an atmosphere more and more eccentric, the promotion of the album involved appearances alongside Michael’s ex-wife, Lisa Marie Presley; interviews talking about her relationship with him; and also about her most intimate piercings, which, according to her, gave her pleasure.
The Velvet Rope is until today her most praised album among fans and critics. In addition to having released her most successful single of all time worldwide, ‘Together Again’, the album sold more than 10 million copies.
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TRACKLIST
1. Interlude: Twisted Elegance
2. Velvet Rope (feat. Vanessa-Mae)
Janet Jackson, James Harris III, Terry Lewis, René Elizondo, Jr., Malcolm McLaren, Trevor Horn, Mike Oldfield
3. You
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo, Harold Brown, Sylvester Allen, Morris Dickerson, Howard Scott, Leroy Jordan, Lee Oskar, Charles Miller
4. Got ‘til It’s Gone (feat. Joni Mitchell & Q-Tip)
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo, Joni Mitchell, Kamaal Ibn Fareed
5. Interlude: Speaker Phone
6. My Need
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo, Marilyn McLeod, Pam Sawyer, Nickolas Ashford, Valerie Simpson
7. Interlude: Fasten Your Seatbelts
8. Go Deep
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
9. Free Xone
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo, James Brown, Billy Buttier, Archie Bell, Michael Hepburn
10. Interlude: Memory
11. Together Again
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
12. Interlude: Online
13. Empty
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
14. Interlude: Full
15. What About
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
16. Every Time
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
17. Tonight’s The Night
Rod Stewart
18. I Get Lonely
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
19. Rope Burn
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
20. Anything
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
21. Interlude: Sad
22. Special (Hidden track: Can’t Be Stopped)
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
BONUS & B-SIDES
JAPANESE BONUS TRACK
23. God’s Stepchild (Hidden track: Can’t Be Stopped)
Jackson, Harris, Lewis, Elizondo
Janet Jackson Red Velvet Album
AUSTRALIAN ‘TOUR EDITION’ BONUS TRACKS
1. Got ‘til It’s Gone (Armand Van Helden Bonus Beats)
2. Together Again (Tony Humphries 12″ Edit Mix)
3. I Get Lonely (Janet vs Jason – The Club Remix)
4. Go Deep (Vocal Deep Disco Dub)
5. Every Time (Jam & Lewis Disco Remix)
B-SIDES
1. Accept Me
2. Ask for More
3. Together Again (Deeper Remix)
4. Together Again (DJ Premier 100 In A 50 Remix)
5. Together Again (Jimmy Jam Deep Remix)
Janet Jackson Velvet Rope Album
'THE VELVET ROPE' SINGLES
Click to know more about 'The Velvet Rope' singles
'THE VELVET ROPE' CHARTS & ACHIEVEMENTS
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Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope Era accolades
The Velvet Rope
'THE VELVET ROPE' MUSIC VIDEOS
Janet Jackson Velvet Rope Live
Watch all Janet's 'The Velvet Rope' videos here