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To Janet Jackson, Minneapolis will always be her 'home away from home' Balancing motherhood and megahits, Janet Jackson talks about her return to Minnesota, where she recorded her breakthrough albums. By Jon Bream Star Tribune September 11, 2019 Solaiman Fazel Janet Jackson performed her “Metamorphosis” show in Las Vegas, which she wrapped up a month ago. Now she’s back on the road and headed to Treasure Island for an outdoor concert Saturday. Janet Jackson sounded like any mom who’d just sent her only child off to preschool for the first time. “It was very sweet, but he’s trying to get his whole schedule set,” she said after Week 1 of school for son Eissa, who turns 3 in January. “He hasn’t figured it out yet. He’s not wanting to get up. He says, ‘I want to stay in bed, Mama.’ ” These days, Jackson is balancing single motherhood and singular superstardom. After completing another leg of her Las Vegas residency and a summer run of European festivals, she’ll perform Saturday at Treasure Island Casino amphitheater in Red Wing, Minn. — her first outdoor appearance in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. “You guys don’t have a lot of bugs now? That’s the one fear: Bugs flying in your mouth,” she said by telephone on Monday. “It won’t be humid and in the 90s. I’ve done that, too. I don’t mind it outdoors.” Jackson knows Minnesota. She recorded her five biggest-selling albums in the Twin Cities— from 1986’s “Control” to 2001’s “All for You” — with producer-songwriters Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. “It’s home away from home for me,” said the longtime Los Angeles resident. “I spent so many years there. It will always hold a special place in my heart. The people are always nice to me. It’s a part of my life. You can’t talk about my career without talking about Minneapolis.” Over the years, Jackson lived in downtown Minneapolis hotels and stayed at Jam’s mansion on Lake Minnetonka. Despite all her treks here, though, she never considered buying property in the Gopher State. She reminisces about learning how to drive a car with manual transmission in the Twin Cities, commuting from Jam’s Minnetrista home to Flyte Tyme Studios in Edina in freezing fog on icy streets. “I was so stressed, but I made it there,” she recalled. “What great memories.” She gleefully remembers making snow angels outside the original Flyte Tyme in south Minneapolis in the late 1980s. “I was so excited. Right out in front of the studio on Nicollet. It was fun for me. “I’m a big kid.” Coloring ‘Rhythm Nation’ That studio is where she made “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814,” released 30 years ago this month. “Minneapolis colored that album in every way,” she said. “It played a huge part. Even calling out the city in ‘Escapade.’ Minneapolis and the album belong together. They really do.” The landmark album sent an unprecedented seven songs into Billboard’s Top 10 — more than brother Michael Jackson’s mega-smash “Thriller” — including “Miss You Much” and “Black Cat.” As always, she sang about romance, but also addressed racism, poverty, drugs and other social issues on what was something of a protest album. “Those were my concerns ... Wanting to make a difference, make a change, wanting the world to be different, trying to make a stance for, ‘Let’s come together and do something about these issues,’ ” she said, getting warmed up. The album is “still very relevant. I feel ashamed to say that. I wish we would have moved on. But hopefully it will, as it has over the years, inspire another generation to listen and to create change in the world how they want to.” Jackson credits Jam and Lewis for helping her find her voice when she came to Minneapolis in 1985 to make “Control.” After two slow-selling albums, singing songs “about other people’s experience” and being told what to do by label executives, she decided to give recording one more try. “Jimmy and Terry wanted to allow me to have my voice and speak about what is going on in my life,” she said. “That’s how it all began.” Jackson is still tight with the hitmaking producers, who relocated to Los Angeles in 2003. “Jimmy just texted me from Paris 10 days ago; I was actually in London at the time,” Jackson said. “We’re still close. I love that.” No terrible twos Her son Eissa is the big relationship in her life right now. Separated from her third husband since their child was four months old, she said she “absolutely loves” motherhood. “It’s definitely changed me for the better. Everyone always said how patient a person I was. But I found a whole new world within myself when it comes to patience and having someone that relies on me to care for. It’s the first thing on my mind and the last thing on my mind.” Not surprisingly, her son is musical. He fiddles with a violin and sings. Jackson made up a bedtime tune to serenade him. “Sometimes he’ll wake up and sing it to me. But he’ll sing it to me, saying his name,” she said like a verklempt mom. “It’s so cute.” Even though she’s a relatively new mother, Jackson sounds like an old soul when asked if Eissa is experiencing the “terrible twos” that parents whine about. “What’s terrible about it? They’re growing up, they’re exploring, they’re discovering, they’re walking into their independence. There’s nothing terrible to me about that,” she said. “They talk about the tantrums. Eissa hasn’t served me with that. So, I’m thankful.” Named to Rock Hall of Fame This year Jackson, 53, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with singer/actress Janelle Monae talking about her as an icon for black women and a model of fearlessness for all women, especially those in the music business. “I never thought about myself being there, even when my brothers [the Jackson 5 and Michael as a solo artist] were inducted,” she said of the Hall of Fame. “It means a great deal to be in this special place, especially alongside my brothers.” The induction evening in March had a more private but equally otherworldly moment — Jackson met Stevie Nicks, a fellow inductee for her solo career. “I never knew she was such a fan,” Jackson said. “We had a nice conversation. Such a sweet woman. She’s someone I used to listen to as a kid in Fleetwood Mac.” Janet is the ninth and youngest of the Jackson siblings. As the second most famous member of the prominent family, she’s always facing scrutiny — from fans, the media and the industry. “I love what I do. But there’s another side of it that you don’t really sign up for. Some artists handle it well, some don’t. You can get very caught up, and I’m just thankful I never did. It has to do with how you’re raised. It’s not an easy business. Being under that microscope, you always have everyone watching you. And it’s that fine line: you must stay true to yourself. And you have to be very careful how you walk, where you step.” Roller skating with Prince One of the other Jacksons brought Prince into Janet’s life long before she came to Minneapolis in 1985 to meet Jam and Lewis. “Prince used to call my house when I was a kid before he became as famous as he became,” Jackson recalled. “He had a crush on my sister LaToya, and I’d always be the one to answer the phone. He used to come roller skate with our family sometimes. Then I had a couple of encounters with him in Minneapolis. We were never best friends, but we knew each other.” With a couple of her besties, Jackson has recorded a new song for “Jam and Lewis Volume 1,” an all-star album — likely featuring Mary J. Blige, Sounds of Blackness and others — by the hit producers that’s due in 2020. It’s “classic us,” she said of the track. Jackson is not working on any other new music, but she’s “still creating things,” though she did not go into specifics. In 2011, she signed a deal with Lionsgate to produce movies. She starred in a series of movies, including 1993’s “Poetic Justice” and 2010’s “For Colored Girls,” after appearing in the TV series “Good Times” and “Diff’rent Strokes” before launching her recording career. With November concert runs in Australia and Hawaii coming up, she’s concentrating on being a music superstar onstage and a new mom offstage. “I sure do lose a lot of sleep. And I don’t ever nap,” she said without sounding whiny. “He’s such a sweet boy. When we travel together, he has a lot of friends among the [touring] group. They have children, and he gets his play time, for sure. “Where does any mother or father get their energy from? It’s something God gives you. You figure it out. You’re the last on your list; they’re first when it comes to everything.” To Janet Jackson, Minneapolis will always be her 'home away from home'

Janet Jackson: ‘This life is not for everybody’Last month, Janet Jackson succumbed to a personal request from her number-one fan. She fired up YouTube and together they watched a handful of her many classic music videos. For the first time in a very long time, the singer was seeing them again.The fan? Jackson’s two-year-old son Eissa. “He says, ‘Watch Mama dance? See Mama dance?’” Jackson is recalling how it all started during an exclusive Australian interview with Stellar.“I said, ‘OK, baby.’ So we have to put a video on. I’d never really watched my videos prior to that, but he wanted to see me dance. We went through [2006’s] ‘So Excited’ to ‘Scream’ [her lauded, budget-busting 1995 film clip with big brother Michael]. I thought, ‘These are really very well done.’“Every aspect from cinematography to direction to choreography to styling... it just amazes me.”That mention of ‘Scream’ is as close as Jackson will come to talking about her late brother Michael Jackson; questions to that effect are firmly shut down by her management team as she speaks to Stellar for a rare one-on-one interview.For better or worse, Janet Jackson has always been in the shadow cast by her superstar sibling, despite herself being one of the highest-selling musical artists of all time, with more than 100 million albums sold worldwide.The fact one family could produce even a single superstar of that calibre, let alone two, is remarkable. Earlier this year, Jackson was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, noting in her acceptance speech that as a kid she wanted to be a lawyer.Her famously strict father Joe, who died in June 2018, wanted her to join the family trade of entertainment. “I was determined to make it on my own,” she told the crowd at the ceremony. “I wanted to stand on my own two feet, but never in a million years did I expect to follow in their footsteps.”Jackson idolised her older brother Michael, who was eight years her senior. But it has been a difficult year to be a fan of the late performer.In March, the documentary Leaving Neverland re-examined and shed new light on decades-old, graphic allegations of child sexual abuse, prompting a fresh outcry and leading some radio stations to remove his vast catalogue of singles from their playlists.His estate and family have firmly denied the claims in the documentary, which aired in the US on HBO. Janet was the only high-profile Jackson sibling not to make a public statement slamming the program, but there were rumblings she did not perform at her Rock Hall induction because it also aired on HBO.In an interview with the UK’s The Sunday Times Magazine in late June, Jackson also refused to discuss the documentary but did observe her brother’s legacy will continue: “I love it when I see kids emulating him, when adults still listen to his music. It just lets you know the impact that my family has had on the world.”Jackson, now 53, was the youngest of nine children born to Katherine and Joe Jackson. By the time she was 10, she was on their TV show The Jacksons and was dabbling in acting with recurring roles on sitcoms like Good Times and Diff’rent Strokes.She signed a record deal in 1982, but it wasn’t until her third album, Control, landed in 1986 that she seized real success.With producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, she also found her own distinctive sound, away from her brother’s omnipresent style.The album’s defiant lyrics and self-explanatory title reflected her brief marriage (she eloped with singer James DeBarge at age 18) and her push to gain independence in all aspects of her life, whether professional or personal.Control was a straight-up blockbuster (seven of its nine tracks were released as singles) and has grown in stature over the years; it is now hailed as a landmark of female empowerment that inspired the likes of Mariah Carey and Beyoncé.Three years later, she released Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, her magnum opus. The sprawling and hard-hitting collection tackles social injustice and covers off heavy issues such as poverty, youth illiteracy and racism — while subversively exploring the topics via catchy, radio-friendly hits.“The motivation behind the album was what was occurring in the world at that time; it was in my face every single day,” Jackson tells Stellar. “I’d watch the news and it was really affecting me and upsetting me.I wanted to bring it to light in my own way, with my generation, not realising it would be considered iconic when I was writing the lyrics. I’m just thankful that several generations later they can still relate to it. And they do.“When they come to the show, they dress in the uniforms [from the ‘Rhythm Nation’ music video], they sing along with the songs as if it was an album that was just released.They’re very familiar with the body of work; that’s a sweet thing for me.”The album’s final single, ‘State Of The World’, was her most political — Jackson wrote it after watching a story she saw on TV involving prostitution, homelessness and drug use.It remains in her live show because she believes it is still pertinent. “It tore my heart apart. We should be ashamed of ourselves,” she says. “It’s shameful. But at some point, it’s got to break. I’ve always talked about things that truly concern me, things that I’m feeling or going through at that time.A lot of that stuff is still very relevant today. I liked to make songs that were thought-provoking, about things that were really happening in people’s lives.”But if Jackson has been candid in her song lyrics, her private life has remained just that — and very much so. Second husband René Elizondo Jnr appeared in one of her videos — and that’s his hands cupping her bare breasts on the cover of her 1993 album Janet — yet their marriage ended bitterly in divorce in 2000.She dated music producer Jermaine Dupri from 2002 to 2009 and in 2010 met Qatari billionaire Wissam Al Mana. They married in 2012 and their son Eissa Al Mana was born in January 2017, but the couple split three months later. Jackson is now based in London, where Al Mana also lives.“It is hard being a working mother,” she tells Stellar. “I don’t have a nanny. I do it all myself. If my mother did it with nine children, there’s no reason I can’t. Of course, when I’m working someone watches him, but it’s my baby and me. It’s not easy at times, but my life has changed. Obviously my baby comes first.”Jackson used to spend endless hours perfecting dance routines. Not anymore. “We used to rehearse eight hours plus; that’s down to maybe four hours. I really have to work harder, given the fact I don’t rehearse as long. Because I don’t want be away from my son.“So far I’ve been able to figure it out and it’s working well. He loves being on the road and being with everyone; everyone adores him.”He is also, she says, “a musician at heart” who has already received a drum kit from The Roots’ Questlove. “It’s a real drum kit, man!” she says proudly.“That’s his thing now. He says, ‘Eissa play drums.’ I have to say, ‘Baby, you can’t play before noon; it’s too early for the neighbours, honey.’”Aside from inheriting his mother’s gifts for dancing and singing — “as pitch goes, he’s spot on” — Eissa has gravitated to another instrument. “He kept taking his drum stick and running it across his guitar,” she says. “I thought, ‘Why is he playing it like a cello?’ He went into his room and got a figurine of a violin and brought it to me. Then he grabbed his drumstick and guitar and kept going.“So I came home with a toy violin, showed him one time how to hold it and that was it. Then I bought him a real violin and he got so excited. He sleeps with it. He eats breakfast, lunch and dinner with it.“I show him little kids playing violin on the iPad, then he was finding them himself, all these child prodigies. He creates melodies.”But Jackson is no stranger to what fame can do to children. “It’s really up to him; if he wants nothing to do with music, that’s fine with me,” she says. “I wouldn’t want him to do this from such a young age. I don’t think it’s for everybody.“You really have to be thick-skinned for this. You can really go in the wrong direction, there’s so much temptation, all kinds of crazy things. You have to be fiercely grounded.”Jackson points out her parents instilled the same grounded work ethic onstage as they did when they were away from the cheers of their audiences. “You’d play for 20,000 people one day and the next you were home and they’d tell you to rake every leaf out of the yard. And we grew up on three acres. That was one of the chores — and we had to get up early to do it. It was those things that kept us so grounded.”The superstar says she tries to keep in contact with her two sisters and five surviving brothers, four of whom still tour as The Jacksons.“We call each other and text a lot, we’ll FaceTime. It bums me out my brothers will tell me, ‘Are you going to be in London? We’re coming there, we have some shows. We want to see you and the baby.’“It’ll just be my luck that I’m leaving town to go to the States. It’s been like that all our lives; we just miss each other. Just recently they were in the UK and I surprised them and showed up at their hotel and we spent some good quality time together. That’s important for a family.”In November, Jackson will return to Australia and perform, for the first time since 2011, in the nationwide RNB Fridays Live tour alongside the likes of The Black Eyed Peas, 50 Cent, Ashanti, Sisqó and Jason Derulo.Fans can expect a smattering of new material, but mostly an onslaught of the dance-friendly hits her legacy is built upon. “Being a festival, you want to keep it up and fun, as opposed to slow songs,” she says. “Those festival shows are non-stop.”Jackson knows her Australian fans have been waiting patiently since her last visit, which was interrupted when she flew home to support her family during the manslaughter trial of her brother’s doctor Conrad Murray, and included one Sydney show that was aborted just minutes before she was due onstage.She remains hopeful the fans who came along then — or just missed out seeing her — will be in the audience once more, or for the first time. She cites “their loyalty, their love... I’m just thankful. None of this had to be. For whatever reason, God chose me. And I’m thankful he gave me the fans that I have. Because they’re beautiful.”

Normani