---

A little before the penultimate show on her Together Again tour the other day, Janet Jackson declared, probably not for the first time in her career, that this was the most fun she’d been having on a tour since her first. At Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena last night, you could feel that sense of pleasure pulsing through a 40-ish-song-long, career-spanning setlist as generous with fan favorites as more underappreciated deep cuts. Jackson performed with the consummate, choreographed-within-an-inch-of-its-life professionalism one expects from someone it’s not excessive to call one of our greatest living live performers. But she also relished, or at least seemed to relish, the moments where she could lean into that fun, giving into some fits of giggles during a clubbier stretch of the concert and flashing some teasing grins during the provocative choreography assisting “I Get Lonely.” 

The Together Again tour, whose title nods to the recent 25th anniversary of 1997’s The Velvet Rope, is something of a more reasonable counterpart to Taylor Swift’s retrospective Eras shows. A scrapbook-esque slideshow and a declaration that we’re celebrating “50 Years of Me” flashing on the screens before the first song begins portends that this will not so much be a greatest-hits performance as one that Jackson finds best representative of the artistry she’s been cultivating since Control, the 1986 blockbuster album most people, unless they consider her basically disowned LPs from 1982 and 1984 legitimate, think of as her first. That was confirmed pretty immediately by her opening the show not with something obvious, but with the eponymous track off 2004’s Damita Jo, a great-but-overshadowed album most inextricable from the post-Super Bowl period where she transformed in an instant from an icon into a pariah — a status that unfairly remained an albatross for years.

It took five songs before Jackson gave the crowd something she probably knew it would freak out over en masse. (“If” prompted that, and I was among the casualties.) It took nine before she properly addressed the crowd, which was so enraptured by her that the many dance breaks peppered throughout the set might as well have been doses of some kind of drug. (The 57-year-old may not still move with her old agility, but she’s still such a force with every head tilt and hip shimmy and ponytail whirl that it’s like she’s in her natural state when she’s dancing and not in repose.) The tour’s title implies the sort of familial familiarity that might initially suggest fan service. But Jackson’s crackerjack performance, only really impeded by slightly-too-long transitions (does any pop star love an interlude as much as she does?), refreshingly proved as interested in servicing the fans as it was in serving herself, who, like all artists, has a lot of stuff in her arsenal whose personal importance and public appreciation were not made equal. Jackson seemed to want to elicit celebration as much as reconsideration.

The Seattle show was broken up, just like on Jackson’s past tours, into distinct, unevenly-but-mostly successful sections; they broadly could be categorized under umbrella terms like “slow songs,” “sexy songs,” or “club songs.” (As any Jackson fan knows, though, none of these descriptions is necessarily mutually exclusive.) Underrated tracks like “Come Back to Me,” “Any Time, Any Place,” and “Throb” respectively did some of the representing. Outfits, from a glittering gold bodysuit accented with purple to a basic black T-shirt emblazoned with RHYTHM NATION tucked into some slouchy black jeans, were strutted around in and then rend. The stage setup was never in one place for very long, either, platforms and balconies and screens added and whisked away as needed. (A row of chairs came out as a dance prop at one point too, though for “Control” rather than “Miss You Much,” which wouldn’t come until later.)

Jackson’s decision to present each section more as a medley, with snippets of songs folding into each other with the ease of an assiduously mapped DJ set, was an efficient way to cover as much ground as possible within a relatively short time frame. At best it made another argument for Jackson’s sixth sense for sonic cohesion and sequencing (not an album from 1986 and onward could be called scattered or sloppy). At worst it might have left you wanting less of one thing and more of another. (Justice for “Black Cat,” which only maybe got a few power chords and feline snarls in.) 

Jackson was smart to dedicate the final section of the concert almost entirely to her magnum opus, Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989): it made you walk out of the building on a high. Engined by a propulsive, hiccuping, drum machine-forward sound built with longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and by rousing lyrics, Rhythm Nation remains Jackson’s most electrifying album. So it naturally is the one that also best translates in a live setting, where one is way more inclined than not to give themselves over to the demands of an undeniable groove. There’s no denying Rhythm Nation. The Rhythm Nation stretch of the show was also where Jackson felt the loosest — where she felt the most in command of the room. Maybe that’s partly because it’s on that album where she most explicitly embodies a leader, calling on her constituents to make the world a better place and using music as their fuel to keep on pushing. She was an effective commander in 1989 and was last night, too; I’d say it felt better than it ever had doing her bidding.

This review originally appeared in 425 magazine.