The Velvet Rope
Velvet Rope (her 7th album from 1997)
Velvet Rope became Janet's four consecutive platinum release. Janet had now over 45 million in record sales.
Velvet Rope produced 2 Top 10 Billboard singles, including one No.1.
Janet won a Grammy and American Music award for Velvet Rope.
After Velvet Rope, Janet was featured in the movie Nutty Professor II. The soundtrack produced her 9th No 1, Doesn't Really Matter.
track list:
1. Twisted Elegance
2. Velvet Rope
3. You
4. Got 'Til It's Gone (featuring Q-Tip and Joni Mitchell)
5. Speaker Phone
6. My Need
7. Fasten Your Seatbelts
8. Go Deep
9. Free Xone
10. Memory
11. Together Again
12. Online
13. Empty
14. Full
15. What About
16. Every Time
17. Tonight's The Night
18. I Get Lonely
19. Rope Burn
20. Anything
21. Sad
22. Special
They really don't deserve this, this time but; Special Thanx to Rolling Stones Magazine
Janet Jackson talks too much. Seven of the 22 tracks on "The Velvet Rope" are so-called interludes -- spoken-word pieces meant to lend extra dramatic gravity to a record already heavy with moral instruction. It's as if Jackson doesn't trust the thrust of her music -- the Prince-style electrogallop of "Free Xone," the drum-and-bass crackle of "Empty" -- or the stout heart in her buttery singing to carry the load. And the message itself is confusing: a lecture in tolerance and tearing down walls by a woman who routinely positions herself on record, in public, as an object of worship. Except for those rare, explosive episodes when Jackson truly loses herself in the locomotion -- the happy house beats of "Together Again," the hopping-mad cadence of "What About" -- "The Velvet Rope" feels like a grand exercise in contrived honesty.
Jackson wants you to believe she's a woman in charge. Ani DiFranco doesn't care what you think; she's been running her own show from the ground up for years. "Living in Clip" is a career-defining package, an indie-rebel-folk "Frampton Comes Alive" that celebrates DiFranco's entrepreneurial savvy, the iconoclastic vigor of her songwriting and her prowess as a performer. In agenda and mood, she evokes improbable but wholly believable flashes of Pete Seeger, Chrissie Hynde, "Blood on the Tracks"-era Bob Dylan and -- come on, go with this -- an acoustic, well-tempered Hole. But if there is plenty of punk here, it's punk as autonomous action and dedicated purpose -- a work ethic of the heart: "I just write about what I should have done/I sing what I wish I could say/And I hope somewhere, some woman hears my music/And it helps her through her day" ("I'm No Heroine"). That goes for guys as well. (RS 776/777)
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