Anyone Whose Heart Can Comprehend
The beats are so intimidatingly big and tall on most of Janet Jackson's pathbreaking Rhythm Nation 1814, they almost overpower everything else on the record. That doesn't seem far from the point. The album's producers, Jimmy "Jam" Harris and Terry Lewis, had their hands on a new sampler (the E-mu SP-1200, the choice of vintage '80s-era hip-hoppers) and a toybox of drum sounds courtesy of Sequential Circuits Drumtraks, which they tuned to sound like industrial noise, breaking glass, and footstomps, then drenched and stone-washed in their trademark gated reverb, for a hard-edged sound they have said was influenced by CNN headlines pouring into their studio (Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall). The result is a wall-slapping crack as expansive and air-clearing as Bonham's on "When the Levee Breaks." Into the wide spaces it blasts open flows some of its decade's most essential and influential music: "Escapade," "Black Cat," "Alright," the searing title track.
To my ears, though, nothing on the record holds up as well as the sneakily sweet battering ram that is "Miss You Much." I think I've identified at least two sources of its durable greatness. For one, there's the irresistible pulse that Harris and Lewis lay on top of the jackhammer 4/4 beat, which in turn animates the steps of Jackson and Anthony Thomas's indelible bob-and-weave dance from the video. Honestly this is as iconic as, if less imitated than, the Bo Diddley beat. Try to count it out without seeing the video play in your mind or feeling the urge to get on your feet yourself:
This jagged lockstep is also the source for the clipped, intense, even obsessive backup vocals of the chorus:
The harmony is the other leavening ingredient that makes the dough rise here. Though the song is in A-flat minor, the addition of the sixth through (the F natural, in a Dorian mode) gives the song's home key the bluesy feel of D-flat dominant 7th chord over an A-flat bass; add the fifth, an E-flat, and it sounds like a D-flat dominant 9th, a very jazzy chord. To my ears, the tense tritone of the "I - I - I - miss you much" vocal harmony (F natural, C-flat) fits snugly around that A-flat root in an equidistant diminished-chord pattern.
All of which is to say: This song song doesn't just slap, it also tickles.
BTW, the video's chair-dance encore cannot be watched and shared enough:
To my ears, though, nothing on the record holds up as well as the sneakily sweet battering ram that is "Miss You Much." I think I've identified at least two sources of its durable greatness. For one, there's the irresistible pulse that Harris and Lewis lay on top of the jackhammer 4/4 beat, which in turn animates the steps of Jackson and Anthony Thomas's indelible bob-and-weave dance from the video. Honestly this is as iconic as, if less imitated than, the Bo Diddley beat. Try to count it out without seeing the video play in your mind or feeling the urge to get on your feet yourself:
All of which is to say: This song song doesn't just slap, it also tickles.
BTW, the video's chair-dance encore cannot be watched and shared enough:
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