Amid a wash of synths, we hear the voice of Janet Jackson: “This time I’m gonna do it my way,” she says.
This is the intro to the aptly-titled Control, the star’s 1986 album, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this week and turned her into a global superstar.
She didn’t do it all on her own, though. When Jackson took to Instagram to wish Control a happy birthday, she tagged both Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the two producers of the record, and the people responsible for giving her the harder-edged sound that was born in Minneapolis through an association with Prince - Jam and Lewis were both members of The Time, until Prince fired them - and then honed to pop perfection.
Discussing the making of Control with the Go with Elmo Lovano podcast in 2025, Jam said: “We had in mind, we wanted to make a very aggressive record with her, because when she was young, if you look at her, like on the talk shows and the variety shows, the Cher, Sunny and Cher show, or any of those shows, back in the day, she had all this, what I call feisty attitude. It was all this attitude. But then her records were all very kind of, like sweet, and we were like, if we can give her tracks and bring that attitude out, that's the thing that I think is going to work.”
Jackson’s previous two albums had been sweet to the point of saccharine, and neither had set the charts alight. In hindsight, Jam and Lewis’s idea of toughening things up seems obvious but, at the time, it was a bold move. Jackon, though, was fully onboard.
“We were like, let's make a record like we're making it for a rock and roller or a rap artist. Let's make the beats like that, like super hard. And that was kind of the idea with Janet, and she embraced it.”
What helped, says Jam, is that this was the first time that Jackson had decided that she really wanted to be a singer, rather than it being something that her dad wanted for her.
“I think we got a different attitude with her,” says Jam “And also bringing her to Minneapolis was great, because there were no bodyguards, there were no limo drivers. She had to drive herself.”
Jackson wasn’t just making a record, she was growing up, and Jam says that he and Lewis used her more mature outlook (though she was still a teenager at the time) as the basis for the songs they were working on.
“We kind of sat around and talked with her for four or five days and didn't go to the studio. And she said, ‘When are we going to get started?’ And we said, ‘Oh, we started,’ and we showed her the opening lyrics to Control - ‘When I was 17, I did what people told me; did what my father said, Let my mother mold me’ - and when she saw the lyrics, she said, ‘Well, this is what we've been talking about.’ We said, ‘Yeah.’ And she said, ‘So whatever we talk about, that's what we're going to write about?’ And we said, ‘Yeah.’ And she's like, ‘Oh, then I want to write about this and this,’ and it was like the lightbulb went off, because nobody had really asked her what she wanted to write about. And I think that was the difference.”
That and Jam and Lewis’s songwriting and production skills. Control would ultimately yield five US Top 5 singles - What Have You Done for Me Lately, Nasty, When I Think of You, Control, and Let's Wait Awhile - and give Jackson a trademark sound and style that countless others would be inspired by.
This wasn’t a big-budget production, though. Jam and Lewis weren’t yet at the stage in their career where they could afford the most expensive synths, but it turns out that only having access to cheaper gear was actually a bonus at times - take the main keyboard part on Nasty, for example.
“This company Ensoniq came out with a synthesizer called a Mirage, and when the Mirage came out, we were like, ‘Oh my god, this is like 1200 bucks,’ or whatever it was. We're like, ‘Oh yeah, we can afford that.’ And it had a bunch of floppy disks in it, and one of the floppy disks on it, the keyboard was split. And I'm as I'm going through the sounds. This one sound is just like ‘gong, gong’ on the bottom and on the top, it's like this little flutey thing. And I just said, ‘Oh, wow.’ And I go, ‘boom, boom.’ And I'm like, ‘Oh, OK, put the drum machine in.' I do it. So when I play it, [Janet] said, ‘Oh, I like that. I like that.' And she said, 'I want to do a song about the nasty boys.’”
Released as Control’s second single, Nasty was a big hit, but the tone for the album was set by What Have You Done for Me Lately? However, although this was the lead single, it was actually recorded right at the end of the album’s six-week recording run, and came about because of some helpful input from an A&M Records A&R man, John McClain (not that one) who was visiting the studio to hear the results of Jam and Lewis’s work.
“We play all these songs, and we think we're done, right?” says Jam. “And like all A&R people he goes, ‘I just need one more.’ I said ‘What are you talking about?’ He said ‘I just need one more.’ We said, ‘forget it.’ So we started playing some stuff from our album - we were gonna work on a Jam and Lewis album - so we started playing [the songs]. About the third track in he goes, ‘That's the one I need for Janet. Play it for her and if she likes it, give it to her.’ I'm like, ‘Oh, now we're giving our songs away?’ I said, ‘OK, cool.’”
This, as you might have gathered, would end up being What Have You Done For Me Lately?, but at this point, Jam and Lewis still needed to get Jackson to agree to record it.
“I remember, she comes into the studio,” says Jam. “She sits on the couch outside of the control room. She's sitting on a couch, and we just put the song on, just a track, and we're watching her on the couch, and she's looking at the TV. Then she kind of puts her head down, she starts kind of bobbing, then she walks to the door and she points at us, and then the song goes off. And she said, ‘Who's that for?’ And we said, ‘Well, you if you want it.’ She said, ‘Oh, I want it.’”
A wise move. With What Have You Done for Me Lately? leading the way, Control would go on to sell 10 million copies, becoming one of the biggest and most influential pop albums of the decade. It would also be the first of many collaborations between Jackson, Jam and Lewis, but this is where it all started.
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