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Janet Jackson’s 1993 Was Her Peak Year, From janet. to Poetic Justice
The Greatest Pop Stars podcast revisits Janet Jackson’s 1993 peak, from janet. and Poetic Justice to iconic videos, looks and performances.
Janet Jackson’s 1993 run is the one that makes the case all over again: after Rhythm Nation, she somehow got even bigger. In the year of janet. and Poetic Justice, she wasn’t just a pop star at the center of the conversation. She was the conversation.
That’s the focus of the latest chapter in Greatest Pop Stars’s Vintage Pop Stardom Week, a series timed to Jackson’s upcoming 60th birthday this Saturday, May 16. All week long, the podcast is revisiting five separate high points in her career, with stops in 1986, 1990, 1993, 1998 and 2001. The point is simple enough: Jackson’s impact in any one of those years could fill a whole feature, and then some.
Janet Jackson on the set of her film Poetic Justice (directed by John Singleton), 1993. Anthony Barboza/Getty Images
For the 1993 episode, host Andrew Unterberger is joined by NYU professor and pop culture expert Naima Cochrane to look back at a year that found Jackson operating at full commercial force and, arguably, at her sharpest artistically too. The record sold, the movie drew attention, the videos landed, the performances stuck, and the looks became part of the lore. Even the magazine covers from that era have their own place in pop history.
The conversation moves through the kind of questions that still animate Janet fans now. How much reinventing did she need to do between 1990 and 1993 to stay on top in a very different pop landscape? Did anyone actually learn the “If” choreography? Was Poetic Justice remembered more for Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur’s on-screen chemistry or the off-screen tension that followed them? Could “Any Time, Any Place” be called an early neo-soul landmark? Did “You Want This” quietly plant a seed for one of the biggest late-’90s hits? And how unfair is it that a career high point was eventually shadowed by scandals she had nothing to do with?
The episode is available above, alongside a YouTube playlist of Jackson’s biggest 1993 moments, all of which come up in the discussion. The podcast continues all week, with 1998 up next, and listeners can also subscribe to Greatest Pop Stars on Apple Music or Spotify, or wherever they get podcasts, for new weekly conversations every Thursday about pop stardom.
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