"What Have You Done for Me Lately?" (Janet Jackson)

Even if Janet Jackson hadn't been the little sister of one of the most famous performers on the planet, I still think she would've found a way to be a star.  There's too much talent and girl-next-door charm there for her not to have been.  In fact, I have to remind myself sometimes that she is part of that Jackson family.  She always seemed too well adjusted and independent to be part of that brood.  (At least, I never heard anything about her trying to buy the bones of the deceased, or caught her selling psychic readings on late night T.V.)

Although she'd recorded two teen-pop albums before her breakthrough Control (1986), I first became aware of her with the track "What Have You Done for Me Lately?"  The moment I heard it, I couldn't get enough of that thumping bassline and those metallic, jazz-inflected cluster chords that punctuate the song's hook.  It's such a deep groove with that electric funk feel of mid-80s Prince, that I initially assumed it was a Prince song, featuring one of his "protégés" like Apollonia or Vanity on vocals.  I actually wasn't too far off, considering it was written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis—former members of The Time, a funk outfit fronted by longtime Prince collaborator, Morris Day.

Story goes, Control was essentially complete, when Jackson's label requested one more upbeat song for the album.  Jam & Lewis had a funk groove that they were working on for their own project but gave it to Jackson, who used it as a springboard for exploring her feelings about her failed marriage to R&B artist James DeBarge.  In a nutshell, it's "Where Did Our Love Go?" by The Supremes flipped on its head; instead of beating herself up, wondering where things went wrong, she lays the blame squarely at her ex-husband's feet: you stopped treating me right.

It was a pretty gutsy statement from a 19 year old who, up to that point, had been recording bubblegum pop records under the stern watch of her father.