Yeah, I watched that guy witter away for two hours and whilst he made a couple of interesting points, the repetitiveness of it all just wore me down and I gave up watching about ten minutes before he stopped recording himself. I think I did quite well.
Bearing in mind that I was once the moderator of that poisoned chalice that was her dotmusic forum for a short while, here's my current take on Janet. She is so easy to criticise. Sometimes she really doesn't do herself any favours in that regard and she practically hands you the wood (no sexual pun intended), the nails and the hammer to assemble the cross to crucify her on - except of course Madonna did the crucifixion thing first on the 'Confessions' tour, so Janet would just be copying (AGAIN).
I'm far more jaded, addled and bitter these days - but I have remained consistently loyal to those acts who had a massive impact on me in my much younger days. I don't care if Kate Bush now looks more like Jabba the Hutt instead of conjuring up images of Princess Leia in her gold bikini courtesy of the 'Babooshka' video. Whilst it pains me that Madonna has asked her plastic surgeon to make her look like Pete Burns and has become a grotesque embarrassment not just on chat shows, but on her own social media channels, I still have nothing but respect for the impact she made. Same with Janet. She's far from perfect. However, I consider myself extremely fortunate to be old enough to have witnessed first-hand the breakthrough and the impact that these acts had at the time. That I am lucky enough to be old enough to have been able to go and see them in concert in their absolute prime and to have had my mind blown by the spectacle.
It's so easy to knock them all now - Madge, Janice and Sinitta, but I think it is important to remember that we accessed music and music videos in a very different way back then. As consumers we purchased actual singles and albums, not just a track here or a track there. We bought the entire product. We invested in it, be it 7", 12", cassette-single, CD-single, picture disc - shaped or regular - and in most cases, because the accompanying music video made us want to own it. The video was everything! It wasn't just a performance, it was an update for that particular act - not just the new music and a possible new sound, but how they looked, what they were wearing, what dance moves you needed to learn to keep up-to-date with them and was the video flashy, controversial and better than Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' - the benchmark against which all videos were compared in the 1980's (and beyond).
Janet held her own back then - giggles and EDIT's fully included.
Lest we forget, we have Janet's boob to thank for YouTube.
Speaking of which, I LOVE watching reaction videos being shared by individuals from a generation that missed out on all of the above. People who have NO idea who Madonna is and have somehow never heard 'Vogue' before. People who have never heard or seen the video for 'Rhythm Nation' and yet know Janet is Michael's sister but that's about all they do know about her. When you watch those enviably much-younger people watching the video for 'Like A Prayer' or 'Wuthering Heights' or 'The Pleasure Principle' for the first time and you see them picking up on the hooks and the performances that captivated you, their eyes widening and jaws dropping in all the right places and you see their faces light up as they LOVE what they are experiencing - that's a whole new generation of people who are listening without prejudice and they are finding something new and amazing in an act that you have loved for decades...THAT is the reality of Janet in 2021.