Wardrobe Malfunction: Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake and the Power of Desperation

By Byron Crawford

Janet Jackson's rusted right can was only on TV for a split second, but it changed our lives forever. Increased FCC regulations changed the landscape of the entertainment industry. A generation of children, traumatized, turned to opioid abuse to cope with the sheer physical pain of seeing an older woman with her shirt off. Janet's career never recovered, supposedly thanks to Les Moonves, who's since been implicated in the Me Too movement.

As a pioneering figure in online music journalism, and as a man of a certain age, who was subjected to Janet Jackson and other artists in a similar vein throughout his youth, Byron Crawford is uniquely well-suited to tell not just the story of what really happened during the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show, but the events leading up to it, and the continuing fallout, with a wit and an intelligence that can't otherwise be found in music journalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Byron Crawford
• Release date: Mar 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463736487

Byron Crawford

Considered a sage in Iran, Byron Crawford is the founder and editor of legendary hip-hop blog ByronCrawford.com: The Mindset of a Champion and the author of The Mindset of a Champion: Your Favorite Rapper's Least Favorite Book. He blogged for XXL magazine for five years.

Book preview

WARDROBE MALFUNCTION

ALSO BY BYRON CRAWFORD

Critical Beatdown (2018)

No Country for Black Men (2015)

Beatings By Dr. Dre: Dr. Dre's Journey From Desperate Ghetto Youth To Billionaire Apple Exec—And The Girls He Beat Up Along The Way (2014)

Kanye West Superstar (2014)

Writin' Dirty: An Anthology (2014)

Nas Lost: A Tribute to the Little Homey (2013)

Infinite Crab Meats (2013)

The Mindset of a Champion: Your Favorite Rapper's Least Favorite Book (2012)

WARDROBE MALFUNCTION

Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake and the Power of Desperation

BYRON CRAWFORD

Copyright © 2019 Byron Crawford

All rights reserved.

www.byroncrawford.com

Cover by Theotis Jones

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

In loving memory of

Joseph Walter Joseph Jackson, 1928-2018

Who left the towel in the swimming pool?

"We can ride through the city no doubt, but don't say my car's topless—say the [expletive] is out."

—Nas

Contents

1. The End of the Innocence

2. If These Walls Could Talk

3. Paid the Cost to Be the Boss

4. Off on Your Own

5. Tender Love

6. Escape from Malcolm Bliss

7. Hotep Jesus

8. U Can't Touch This

9. The Mile-High Club

10. Poetic Justice

About the Author

1

The End of the Innocence

"How are ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?"

—The Dude

It's quite possible that I suppressed any and all recollection of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, to protect myself from the mental image of Janet Jackson's wrinkled, deflated, inappropriately displayed right tit.

Pulling up grainy footage of the show just now, for the purpose of researching this book, it occurred to me that I don't know for a fact that I'd ever seen it before. Nothing about it seemed familiar to me.

As I'm writing this, the '04 Super Bowl was upwards of 15 years ago, and I'm not nearly as young as I used to be (to think, I was once 23 years old), so it could be that I'd just plain forgotten.

At the time, I was in the middle of my 10th consecutive semester in college, even though you only need eight (if that) to graduate. Hey, I was taking my time! It turns out I'd never have shit else better to do anyway.

I do have fond memories of watching the 2000 Super Bowl, when I was a freshman. That was the year the Rams won. Many of the kids at the erstwhile directional school I went to hail from St. Louis. We watched it on the big screen in the same room where, a while later, there was an important—and confrontational—school-wide meeting about 9/11.

I seem to recall having been provided with free chili . . . which was probably just charged against our room and board. Nevertheless, I appreciated the gesture; it let me know that the administration, and the ladies in the cafeteria, were thinking about a brother.

The Rams, as I recall, were in at least one more Super Bowl, which may have also taken place when I was in college, but they lost because the New England Patriots were cheating. Since then, the Patriots have at least appeared in, if not won, each subsequent Super Bowl, while St. Louis doesn't even have a football team anymore.

The 2004 Super Bowl was between the Patriots and the Carolina Panthers. I usually do watch the Super Bowl, but it's hardly inconceivable that, during this particular game, I was down some Internets-pornography wormhole, or doing charity work with local schoolchildren.

Even if I did watch the Super Bowl, there was nothing about this halftime show that would have prevented me from getting up to relieve myself, or try to scare up some free chili, or both.

It was produced by MTV, which I watched (literally) constantly during my adolescence and young adulthood, but it was at a time when they weren't even playing music videos on MTV. Janet Jackson was the de facto headliner, and I don't recall seeing any of her videos on MTV since back during the Rhythm Nation era.

Maybe they were playing some of the stuff she had out circa Poetic Justice, like That's the Way Love Goes. If they did, I may have tuned out; I haven't cared for much of what she's done since the 1980s.

When I was in high school, back in the dark ages, I used to switch from the Super Bowl halftime show to the Beavis and Butthead Super Bowl halftime show on MTV, which I think was called the Butt Bowl.

I don't think very many people watched the Super Bowl halftime show back then, and I don't recall any of the performers. They may have just been random people from the town the Super Bowl was in, which is what they do during halftimes of college basketball games here in St. Louis. They might bring out a hip-hop dance team from a white high school, or a child who doesn't have very long to live.

CBS, the network that aired the Super Bowl in '04, owns MTV, and I guess they figured this was a good opportunity to benefit from corporate synergy. The people who produce 60 Minutes don't know anything about putting on a concert (that I'm aware of), but MTV, at the very least, has access to artists.

Artists aren't paid to perform in the Super Bowl halftime show, but what artist would turn down an invitation to perform at an event put on by MTV? That's basically asking for your video to never be played on MTV ever again, as if it were Ice Ice Baby, which was memorably retired on a show called 25 Lame, or something to that effect.

The presenting sponsor for the halftime show was something called AOL Top Speed, which . . . I don't even know what that is. Was it a form of dial-up Internet that was actually fast? Were people even using dial-up Internet in 2004? I don't recall AOL being a thing after, like, the late '90s. You had to upgrade to at least DSL (ahem) to download the bootleg version of Mobb Deep's Murda Muzik. Though I know a few people (i.e. the elderly) still pay like $20 a month for AOL because they think they need it to access their email.

The weird, tragic turn of events during the halftime show wouldn't necessarily have been a bad thing for AOL Top Speed, since you'd need high speed Internet service to try to download a video of the so-called wardrobe malfunction the next day, and maybe the name of AOL's service would have been fresh in people's minds. Still, I would have tried to get my money back, if I were them. As Parrish Smith would say, business is business.

MTV had Sway acting as an announcer for the show, and I'm not sure why. I love Sway (in a hetero sort of way). He's a knowledgeable brother, and a hip-hop radio legend, and he was right when he told Kanye that he didn't need those white people to start his own clothing line. But he's not an especially gifted announcer. He's kinda mushmouthed, right?

I guess they needed someone with a flair for hip-hop, given the evening's lineup of performers, and I don't know who else they had at that point. Bill Bellamy was long gone. Star was on MTV for a hot minute back in the early '00s, but obviously he was out of the question. I wonder if they couldn't just have the guy who did the AOL ad do it because Kurt Loder or someone insisted on maintaining some notional Great Wall of China between the advertising department and the part where they played the music videos, which themselves were just ads for albums.

If it hadn't been announced at the outset that the halftime show was produced by MTV, which it was, it would have been clear to anyone who was familiar with the cable network. It was very MTV-esque, from the list of performers, to the signature epilepsy-aggravating, hyper-kinetic editing. All it was missing was cameos from some of the fondly remembered VJs of yesteryear, including Kennedy; Pauly Shore, a/k/a the Weasel; Daisy Fuentes; the Julie Brown with the large cans; and Fab 5 Freddy.

We already knew that Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake performed (if you will) that evening, but a lot of people, if they're like me in that they have no recollection of this event, would be surprised to learn that there were several other performers that evening, more than you'd think would fit in a show that didn't even run 15 minutes. Other performers included Kid Rock, P. Diddy, Nelly and Jessica Simpson. It was the most 2002 thing that ever happened, but this was 2004.

After the brief introduction, there was a video montage in which the

Reviews for Wardrobe Malfunction

[Gold St · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's important to note that I've been a reader of Bol's since I was a teenager and have read almost each of his books, as well as most of his blog posts and Medium articles. I subscribe to his weekly (or so) newsletter and, for some reason, also follow him on social media. It's important to note this because if you're not familiar with Byron Crawford's refined but crass sense of humor, it would be hard to follow the ironies and layered sarcasm he throws behind his work. It would seem that a lot of his observations and remarks are mean spirited and maybe they are. But then how is a pop music critic not supposed to be mean?

Wardrobe Malfunction follows in a long line of exceptionally hilarious and insightful works detailing things that seem to be lost to a generation heavily set in historical amnesia, even in terms of pop culture. Whether or not this particular book seems shorter than his past works is neither here or there because it's no less of a trip to read and there is no less of things to google afterward, such as pictures of Emily Ratajkowski's body or the Infamous Janet Jackson Superbowl Halftime performance which the book revolves around. I was only 13 when the incident happened but Byron has a way of remastering and reloading the environment in which Janet and Justin's careers (JnJ) flourished and what they've endured since while also, needlessly but compellingly, shooting did-you-knows about the people in the industry around them at the time.

All in all, it's a solid book and is a reminder to why Bol stays one of my favorite writers of all time (OF ALL TIME) and why his literary voice only becomes more refined, funny and ruthlessly sharp as time goes on.