Of late, I've undergone a radical recaliberation re: my musical taste. In the early naughties (00s) (when indie was fun), I was a rock guy with a fuse lit by the opening guitars of The Strokes' "Last Night." The scene fragemented, interesting bands failed to issue more than one good album ... I got a little older and perhaps a bit nostalgic, as Michael Chabon wrote in Maps & Legends, "... for times before [my] own."
(As I a kid, my musical axis in the 80s where I precociously consumed MTV's video heavy lineup in lieu of Super Friends, Transformers, He-Man, or other popular cartoons.)
Enter 2007. After a protracted and still existent love of disco, I turned to Motown with a surprisingly encyclopedic knowledge of their songbook from "Oldies" radio that I listened to on drives with my dad, the California Raisins, and bizarre 80s cover versions (I'm talking Kim Wilde, ya'll).
While Miss Jackson is not part of this time before my own, she (or her producers Jam & Lewis in this case) make interesting use of a sample from "Someday We'll Be Together" in "If." The Supremes version is far from the crotch-grabbing "Asian persuasion" of Miss Jackson but it fuses a time I remember well (1994) with an earlier era. In the malaise of 2008, both feel seem gentler and simpler. Worthy of a "good ol'" appelation.
"If" was part a top ten single from janet. Upon its release, Rolling Stone magazine wrote: "As princess of America's black royal family, everything Janet Jackson does is important. Whether proclaiming herself in charge of her life, as she did on Control (1986), or commander in chief of a rhythm army dancing to fight society's problems (Rhythm Nation 1814, from 1989), she's influential. And when she announces her sexual maturity, as she does on her new album, Janet., it's a cultural moment."
A unified media experience is in some ways a cultural nostalgia from me. While I passionately love and insanely depend on the internet to inform me in a way previously thought unimaginable from sources of my chosing, I do miss, from a pop culture perspective, times when a pop song, a music video could become cultural moments. Touchstones of common memory and cameraderie. We lose something in that lack of connection even as we gain a richer more personally meaningful experience in self-programming our television, cinematic, news, sports, and musical entertainment experiences.
