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Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 1990: Janet Jackson
Janet Jackson is Billboard's Greatest Pop Star of 1990 for how she raised the standards for high-concept, socially conscious pop in the early '90s.
It arrived in September 1989, more than three years after she blew open the doors of modern R&B with the funky, in-your-face statement piece (and call for her own independence) that was Control, her first collaboration with her now-career-spanning producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. The messages shared threads with those coming out of hip-hop at the time from Public Enemy, Salt-N-Pepa and N.W.A, but unlike those contemporaries, Jackson’s music came in a pop and R&B package whose call-to-action was twofold: pay attention, but also dance. Those nods included one for best rock vocal performance, female, for the Jellybean Johnson-produced (and Janet solo-penned) “Black Cat”: a nomination that proved Jackson, consistently labeled R&B, was too versatile to be contained to one category.
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