CHAPTER 2
JANET
!"##$%&' , ()* +#"$ , ,-.-
!"#$% &$'(() . *#+( ,) -) # +#'% #)+ +#./ factory, drained of all color. Search lights circle above; rain pools down the brick walls. A monotone voice beams down: We are a nation with no geographic boundaries. Bound together through our beliefs.
Flashes of lightning: Dark then light then dark again. Across a 0oor of heavy machines, the camera moves, seeking something.
We are like-minded individuals. Sharing a common vision.
1en a 2gure in a corner, hunched over. 1e face of a teenage boy, dark-skinned and distraught. An earth-shaking rumble as a freight elevator descends.
Pushing toward a world rid of color lines.
Lights crash on the boy’s wet and weary face as he looks up toward the sound.
5 4#& 64()67 - 64- 7(#'& old when a music video changed my life.
After thirteen months in rehab, I was back living in my mother’s Brooklyn apartment, the only home I’d ever known. Twenty-two years and I was back where I started. 1ough I was clean for the time being, no longer headed for an early grave, I didn’t have much to show for my time on this Earth. Staying alive had been enough. Until it wasn’t.
My hours were spent working in a temp position for a pharmaceutical company and taking business management classes at community college. But I didn’t belong in either place. I was just going through the motions, living out my mother’s version of what success should be. 1e template my older brother had set. Meanwhile, I was waiting for something—for anything—to happen.
1ere had to be more than just surviving; there had to be living, and I had this buried desire to 2nd whatever that was. I just hadn’t yet found the courage to seek it out.
By that point, my mother and I were ships destined to collide. We were getting on each other’s nerves, on top of each other’s business, and up in each other’s faces. I had been putting o8 the inevitable, delaying whatever adulthood awaited me out there. Sure, I was still scared of her, in some way would always be, but maybe I was more scared of venturing out on my own. It’s hard to say. All I knew was that I was 0oating in some kind of purgatory, until something showed up like a message beamed from the future.
Anytime I could get into that apartment when my mother wasn’t home, I was there. So in the living room I watched the MTV countdown, waiting for Janet Jackson. At the sofa’s
edge, I sat, ready to pounce. I leaned forward to peek into the VCR to make sure the blank tape was ready to go for me to record it.
Back then, before we had much control over what we heard or saw, the anticipation gave it this extra jolt. You had to put in work to 2nd the music you wanted, especially if you had no money. You valued it more because it wasn’t so easily available. And when it arrived, it felt like the fates answering you, like you’d snatched lightning in a bottle.
1e television screen went all black. I bounded from the couch and pressed Record on the VCR, stuck my ear to it to make sure I heard that whirring sound. 1en I sprang up and got into position in front of the co8ee table, feet on my mom’s rust-orange carpet. Back straight as a board, arms at my sides, 2sts tightened, I faced the screen and waited for Janet to count o8.
1e opening shots of the factory, the ominous elevator, the scared boy. 1en heavy boots moving purposefully down the metal stairs, stepping through the smoke. Figures dressed in militant black uniforms with silver buckles, black caps pulled down low. Not just a dance troupe but a platoon.
1en Janet’s gloved hand: #, ", $, %, !.
1e snare drum kicks o8 like a gunshot, the groove of the bassline and the New Jack Swing beat that could’ve put a dead man on his feet. 1e dancers launch into it like they were sprung from a cannon. Limbs swinging in perfect synch, legs marching and gliding at the same time. 1ey all turn ninety degrees as though on spindles: left, back, right, front again. A dance in regimented precision but 0uid like water.
Finally, Janet’s voice like a whip: With music by our side, to break the color lines.
Her voice is 2erce but not hard. It’s optimistic, proud— declarative. It lands with authority, and I trust her because of that con2dence. 1e troupe behind her trusts her, too, mimicking her moves exactly. In the sharp black and white, their colors and genders are all washed out, discarded, ignored. 1ey are all part of a single voice.
1e boy onscreen, who is now up on his feet, goes searching. His fear has shifted into something else: curiosity. He wanders the cavernous space, seeking out the sound that has broken through his desperate world. When he 2nally gets a glimpse of Janet and her dancers, the view is obstructed by a chain-link fence. Eyes never looking away, he walks along it, with his hand as a guide. 1e song is an invitation, like Janet is personally beckoning him: a generation full of courage come forth with me. 1e boy is no longer alone. He is far from healed—he will never be fully healed—but there’s a glint in his eye. 1e world has made room for him.
I cannot overstate how important “Rhythm Nation” was to my lost and aching twenty-two-year-old self. It spoke to the man I was and the boy I had been. 1e pull was so magnetic, I remember thinking: I am this boy. And I didn’t mean it as a 2gure of speech. I didn’t know where he ended and I began. I, too, wore my pain and loneliness like skin. I, too, was desperate for someone to reach out. And I, too, was being pulled by an invisible force, by the same force that was pulling him in on the screen. I was seeing myself on the television for the 2rst time. 1is was not a music video. It was a goddamn earthquake.
5 3#+ :'-4) ;/ with cute, baby-faced Janet—she was my age exactly—as well as Michael and their brothers. 1ose songs were the soundtrack to my childhood. I’d sneak on my mother’s wig and sing Jackson < songs like “Let Me Show You the Way to Go” into her feminine wash bag, having no idea what it was. 1e tube part looked like a microphone to me. I’d sing and dance in front of the mirror, pretending the crowd was going wild for me too.
But “Rhythm Nation” was something else. 1e statement of a grown woman, sure, but Janet had a couple of records out by then—records about independence, love, sex. But this was something even bigger. A call to action. A message sent from a place where I belonged, a home I didn’t even know existed.
1e dancing and the music was interconnected for me. I wanted to understand the dancing, to get inside of it, to inhabit it myself. 1is choregraphed movement that was both so precise and so free. Since I’d been a kid, dancing had put me in touch with my body, connected me to this life force and energy. Friends and I used to choreograph dances in the hallway and perform for girls or our mothers. But it was not a proper 2eld, according to my mother. Not academic or professional enough for her. Not worthy of her son. So the desire lay quiet in me. But it never died.
“Rhythm Nation” was a freight train that woke it all up. I rehearsed and rehearsed that dance, getting a little more of the routine down each time. Once I got the video on tape, I did little else but practice in front of that television. If I didn’t land each move exactly right, I was in the wrong position for the next one, so it was all connected. So there I was,
day in and day out. Rewind. Play. Pause. Rewind. Play. Pause. I damn near wore that tape down to nothing. Once I felt con2dent enough, I performed it for some people I knew. 1e response was quick—and devastating. 1ey knew better. 1ey watched me for a little and then keeled over. “You going the wrong way, Mike!” they said, busted over laughing.
“What do you mean?” I didn’t even understand.
“You’re going backwards. You gotta face away from the screen!”
I had been dancing facing Janet like a mirror, but to do a routine you have turn away from the screen, as though you’re in the formation. It seemed obvious once they said it, but what did I know? I swallowed the embarrassment and went back at it. I parked in front of that TV, annoying my mother who wanted to watch her shows, practicing before breakfast in the morning and when the building was asleep at night. I faced away from the screen and looked over my shoulder to get it right. I watched out of the periphery of my eyes until I could do it with my eyes closed. I wasn’t a fan imitating the dance; now, I was in it, among Janet and her crew. It severed the division between us. 1e whole world drained away and I was among them. 1at’s what 2rst gave me the idea that I could do this for real.
Dancing along to that video transported me out the window of that 2fth-0oor apartment in the projects, out to the streets of East Flatbush, across the East River to Manhattan, and on to the wider world. It all came together on that screen: my Blackness, my fear, my loneliness, dance, music, performance—it was like an explosion. Years later I read an interview where Janet said she was trying with that song to
reach out to anyone who was teetering on the edge. And if she could get to one person, it would be worth it.
She found one.
“Rhythm Nation” was like a line drawn. I could stay and rot away or give myself over to this bigger thing. It was a risk but not a fantasy. More like a dare-to-dream moment. 1e video spoke to my brokenness but, at the same time, separated me from it, liberated me from it. I saw that I could be myself and still be strong. Dance had long been part of my identity. It had been a form of expression when I didn’t feel like I had any other. So it made divine sense for it to be my way out.
When I closed my eyes at night, I saw myself in formation behind Janet. 1at song and its video were a turning point, but I also took it literally: something I loved, that I had been good at my whole life, I could make a living at. So I came to what felt like a natural conclusion, though it sounded strange aloud: I was going to become a Janet Jackson background dancer.
I would make it happen: move out, quit my job, drop out of school. I would join the New York dance scene, immerse myself in that world, and 2nd Janet. Or she’d 2nd me. I’d start at the fringes and make my way in, through all the concentric circles and hoops, until I reached her. It had never appeared so real, so close, as it did dancing in my mother’s apartment.
Dance—and music—had always been a rebellion in my home, a mutiny against my mother. And it would be again. She would berate me for throwing away a good job and a degree for what she saw as a pipe dream. But I knew better.
When something powerful reaches you just at a time when you’re ready to hear it, you have to strike. So I did.
I was tired of looking at that scared boy in the mirror, the one who was convinced he couldn’t be anything. I was young, but had already been through enough heaviness for a lifetime. 1at scared boy was always just underneath the surface. No matter how many years I put behind me, he was the voice in my head and the spirit in my body. I carried him with me wherever I went.