Cause A Love Intervention

Janet Jackson “Gon’ B Alright”

Janet Jackson works through a lot of grieving and uncertainty over the course of Unbreakable, but she wraps up the album with this celebration of love and joy in the style of Sly and the Family Stone and The Jackson 5. Janet’s only touched on ‘60s and ‘70s R&B styles a couple times before in her career, and in the case of a song like “Whoops Now,” she was going for a more light and feminine sort of song. This pushes her in a very different direction, with several multi-tracked versions of herself covering a variety of timbres ranging from androgynous to overtly masculine. She does a lot of this pitch-shifting on the record, in part because it’s just so uncanny how much she sounds like her brother Michael when pitched down just a bit. It’s her way of channeling him, and bringing him back to us. I think if anyone else could do that, it’d just feel creepy and wrong, but with her, it’s genuinely poignant. I love the way “Gon’ B Alright” feels like Janet paying tribute to her brothers, and after all this time getting her turn to be a member of the band rather than just a baby sister.

Buy it from Amazon.