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"Malfunction" Reveals New Information about Janet Jackson's Infamous Superbowl Halftime Performance

Photo credit: KMazur - Getty Images
Photo credit: KMazur - Getty Images

The latest entry in the trendy category of cultural revisionism content arrived on Friday in the form of Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson. The documentary is an instalment of The New York Times Presents which the impactful Framing Britney Spears is also part of. In fact, the two documentaries are structured quite similarly, with old footage and commentary from key figures coming together to offer a familiar critique on misogyny, media, and Justin Timberlake.

For those who were alive and conscious for Janet Jackson’s now infamous Superbowl XXXVIII halftime show performance, there won’t be much new information to absorb in the first half of Malfunction. Still, it’s helpful to reflect on some of the event details that the media has debated and distorted over time.

To sum up briefly: Janet Jackson and her stylist came up with the costume stunt—at least that’s what Salli Frattini, former senior vice president for MTV, believes. It was supposed to reveal a red bustier, not her nipple. Jackson didn’t run her idea by CBS or any of the event producers. Justin Timberlake only learned about it the day of the performance. No one rehearsed the big moment, which in hindsight, everyone regrets.

The new information kicks in after the summary. That’s when we learn more about the fallout from the incident and just how far former CBS CEO Les Moonves, who stepped down in 2018 after several women alleged he sexually assaulted them, went to censor Janet Jackson throughout the unhinged uproar that ensued. According to The New York Times reporter Rachel Abrams, Moonves demanded Timberlake and Jackson apologise to him for the incident in person. Timberlake showed up to CBS’s Los Angeles offices and “kissed the ring,” says Abrams, but Jackson refused. Meanwhile, public outrage grew.

Local radio stations refused to play Jackson's new album Damita Jo. Complaints to the FCC surged. CBS and MTV executives were even subpoenaed to testify in front of Congress. And the more the outrage grew, the more Moonves’s demands for Jackson’s contrition grew alongside it.“This is a man who is known by people who worked for him as someone who would hold grudges, someone who quoted the Godfather, someone who you did not cross, because he had the power to make or break your career.” says Abrams halfway through Malfunction.

Things came to a tipping point a week after the Super Bowl on the night of the 2004 Grammys, which were scheduled to air on CBS. Those airing rights meant Moonves got to decide who would and wouldn’t be invited to music’s biggest night. According to Ron Roeker, former VP of Communications of the Recording Academy, Moonves held Jackson's and Timberlake’s appearances ransom, saying they could only attend if they offered on-air apologies. Once again, Jackson refused, and that’s why she was notably absent from the Grammys.

If you follow the internal logic and structure of Malfunction, things unraveled for Jackson immediately following the Grammys, and her decision to not apologise on-air set the entire unwinding of her career in motion. But there’s more than one way to consider this transformational moment.

Janet Jackson was 38 in 2004. She already had one of the longest and most successful careers ever in pop music history. Yes, Damita Jo, the album she released after the infamous wardrobe malfunction, underperformed, and Malfunction goes to great lengths to document the many ways in which the entertainment industry systematically distanced itself from Jackson while simultaneously embracing the white man who had an equal role in the incident. But to claim that her halftime performance torpedoed Janet Jackson's career, is to miscalculate her previous achievements and the limited worlds she had left to conquer at the time of the incident.

More importantly, the idea denies Jackson her own agency. Ever since she released her monumental album Control, which she recorded right after kicking her Dad off her management team, Jackson has kept a firm grip on her creative projects. She spent the better part of the '90s defending her magnum opus Janet against sexist critics who mistook the album's intimacy for pornography. Jackson built her reputation on the principle that no man could tell her what to do and by denying Moonves in-person and on-air apologies, she maintained it.

As the critic Jenna Wortham notably points out towards the end of Malfunction, no apology Jackson offered, either to herself or to Moonves, was going to stop the tornado of outrage that was sweeping across the nation. Misogynoir is simply too powerful an opponent. But by denying Moonves an apology, Jackson controlled her own position within the whirlwind. It was a stake in the ground—a position she can now reflect on and say “I did that” instead of “someone forced me to do that.” Justin Timberlake will never know that feeling.

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