article: After seven years away from the studio, Janet Jackson releases a new album, Unbreakable, on Friday. It comes after a tumultuous decade in which her brother, Michael, died; and her music was banned by some US radio stations after a Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction". Unbreakable feels like a response to those events, as well as some happier ones, in particular Jackson's 2012 marriage to Qatari businessman Wissam Al Mana. Over 17 tracks, the singer talks about grief and depression, but also about love, loyalty and compassion. Most importantly, she stresses, friends will pull you through the hard times. The record reunites Jackson with producers Jam and Lewis, who rescued her from bargain bin ignominy in 1986, and masterminded all of her most successful albums, from Control to janet and beyond. Speaking to the BBC from New Orleans, Jimmy Jam revealed the stories behind the star's signature songs, and picked his highlights from the new album. Janet's first single with Jam & Lewis, What Have You Done For Me Lately presents the singer as a fierce, independent woman, ruthlessly dismissing her feckless boyfriend. "You ought to be thankful for the little things," she scolds, "but little things are all you seem to give." Originally, What Have You Done For Me Lately was going to be a track on an album Terry and I were working on - our own album. The rest of the Control album was totally done but [record label executive] John McClain said: "Hey guys, I just need one more song." The lyric came up because of a relationship Janet had gotten out of [her marriage to soul singer James DeBarge, which was annulled a year earlier]. The concept was basically, "he used to do nice things for you, but what has he done for you lately?" All of the songs we did with Janet on the Control record had a lot of attitude. She always had a lot of attitude in the parts she played on TV and we thought that was missing in her previous albums. So, with Nasty, with Control, with a lot of the songs on the album, we tried to bring that out: Really aggressive tracks, really hard-hitting tracks, because we knew she could pull them off. The Rhythm Nation album opens with a triptych of songs calling for action against poverty, racism and illiteracy. Among them is State of the World, which captures Janet's growing horror as she witnesses homelessness, drug dependency and prostitution right on her doorstep. We were trying to do something like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On - although we never could hope to achieve that - but we wanted to make people aware of what was going on, in a way where you could dance to it. On that record there were a lot of metallic sounds, a lot of trash cans and glass breaking - the sort of things that were the sonic landscape of the streets. Did we worry about front-loading the album with a big social message? No, we weren't concerned. Maybe if the record company actually
summary: Janet Jackson's chief collaborator, Jimmy Jam, reveals the secrets behind their biggest hits and talks about her new album, Unbreakable.