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Nipplegate at 10: How Justin Won Superbowl XXXVIII, and How Janet Lost


Lombardi's_kid_brother

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Interesting article on how Justin Timberlake threw Janet under the bus and went on to have a monstrous career while her career cratered.

 

But that's easy to say with a decade's remove. "She probably got what she was looking for," he told CNN at the time, sounding like a real creep. She didn't, though. Her next album flopped, and she's all but disappeared from glossy magazines and MTV, while Timberlake is still winning Grammys and Michael Powell is presenting a revisionist history of the event to ESPN Magazine.

 

But how? How did this happen? How did the superstar scion of one of America's most recognizable families come completely undone in 9/16ths of a second, while the boy-band refugee became one of music's biggest stars? How did Janet lose the Super Bowl, and how did Justin win?

 

 

 

 

http://gawker.com/nipplegate-at-10-how-justin-won-superbowl-xxxviii-and-1511051968

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agree with bangs first point. 

 

JT is talented. i've never thought janet jackson was a particularly good singer/dance/actress, whatever. she may be the epitome of 'overrated'.

 

btw- where the hell did i read or hear that she was worth something like 500 million bucks???!!! made zero sense to me.

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agree with bangs first point. 

 

JT is talented. i've never thought janet jackson was a particularly good singer/dance/actress, whatever. she may be the epitome of 'overrated'.

 

btw- where the hell did i read or hear that she was worth something like 500 million bucks???!!! made zero sense to me.

She's sold over 100 million albums.  I'm not surprised that she's worth that much.

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Whether you think she is "talented" or not, she sold 100 milion records in her career and was still putting out #1 singles in 2001, the last year she released an album prior the nipple that brought down an empire.

 

Whether you think her career was in decline or not, these are the facts:

 

1. She was banned from the Grammys the following month; Timberlake was allowed to attend and received two awards.

2. The head of the FCC publicly criticized her, not Timberlake - even though Timberlake was the one who actually opened her top.

3. MTV and VH1 refused to promote her next album; this did not happen to Timberlake.

 

The question the article asks is, Why was her career targeted and not Timberlake's?

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The article does have a pretty devastating breakdown of all the ways that Timberlake has changed his role in the performance over the years.

 

The other really interesting point to me is that Judy McGrath, who was president of MTV at the time, put the blame fully on Janet Jackson, calling her a renegade performer. Despite the fact that - again - Timberlake pulled open her shirt during a heavily rehearsed MTV production.

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Weird.  I didn't really give this much thought and trumped it up to a bit of a conspiracy theory until I read the article. 

 

It's not something that keeps me up at nights, but Janet Jackson has pretty much vanished from the mainstream from that night. Her albums get no push anywhere and if it weren't for Tyler Perry, she would be practically invisible.

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The whole episode was such overhyped b.s. and a perfect example of culture wars hypocrisy. They were dressed up in s&m style clothes singing some song about "I wanna take your clothes off," and for literally half a second the background of a nipple (which was actually 80% covered by some weird silver ornament gets flashed. Network execs and FCC facists freak out about such a egregious affront to family based entertainment, exposing young'uns to the horrors of an almost nekkid female breast (for which they had to rewind and pause their DVRs just to be certain)...after which probably half a dozen paid commercials appeared ending with the warning about erections lasting more than 4 hours and making sure your heart is safe for sexual activity.....

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in overly simplistic and broad sweeping terms it is because our society punishes women for being sluts, and celebrates men for doing the same.

 

i find the double standard revolting.


..and janet Jackson is now 47 years old.  too old to be the hot entertainer (as a woman), and not far enough removed yet from her time in the spotlight to have her revial for a run of kenedy center type appreciation concerts

 

(think of carol burnett, right now.....)

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I think those are interesting points, lbk.

Coming from my perspective, where I think there's a big difference in talent may answer only part of the question as to why their careers went in opposite dieections.

 

I don't understand this argument. If Janet Jackson was - say - Kesha and had a couple borderline novelty songs to her credit at that point, I can see people saying "Oh...she's so talentless. It was bound to come crashing down eventually."

 

In 2004, Janet Jackson had been famous for something like 30 years. She had 5 albums in a row from 1986 to 2001 go Triple Platinum (selling something like 30 million units in the process). All her albums from Control forward were pretty well reviewed. Did everyone in 2004 just say, "Oh...yea...she actually sucks," because that seems crazy to me.

 

Their careers went in different directions because Viacom decided to blame Janet Jackson and blacklist her while Justin Timberlake was given a pass.

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Can we have JT do another Super Bowl half time please? Bruno Mars is going to be awful. Beyoncé last year was the best performance in the past 5-10 years.

 

A little fun fact. Beyoncé has her "E" at the end of her name auto corrected on internet explorer. She is that famous.

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Can we have JT do another Super Bowl half time please? Bruno Mars is going to be awful. Beyoncé last year was the best performance in the past 5-10 years.

 

A little fun fact. Beyoncé has her "E" at the end of her name auto corrected on internet explorer. She is that famous.

 

People actually watch the halftime show?  Yawn.

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Their careers went in different directions because Viacom decided to blame Janet Jackson and blacklist her while Justin Timberlake was given a pass.

Her career was already winding down by that point. She could have kept her relavancy going too if she'd come up with a string of masterpiece pop albums that are far more critically revered than anything she'd come out with in her own career, done a couple of instant classic SNL bits that everyone saw, and turned in 10 to 15 solid Hollywood performances in a wide variety of films.

This stuff didn't come to define Justin Timberlake or end his career just like his silly past with NSync, Britney Spears, and the Mickey Mouse Club didn't because his work kept getting better and better.

If Janet Jackson had done Justin Timberlake's work post wardrobe-malfunction, it wouldn't define her career either.

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If Janet Jackson had done Justin Timberlake's work post wardrobe-malfunction, it wouldn't define her career either.

 

No one really seems to be getting that she was not allowed to do the work after this.

 

She was kicked off the Grammys the next week; Timberlake attended and was honored.

She was blacklisted from MTV, VH1, and CBS-related radio stations; Timberlake was not.

 

She was punished. He was not. Why? She was not that old (37). Her last album was triple platinum. She was probably one of the five or ten biggest recording acts of the previous 20 years.

 

It's bizarre that in her last tour, she's playing places like Constitution Hall and the Greek Theater, while Madonna's last tour was in places like The Verizon Center and Yankee Stadium.

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I don't understand this argument. If Janet Jackson was - say - Kesha and had a couple borderline novelty songs to her credit at that point, I can see people saying "Oh...she's so talentless. It was bound to come crashing down eventually."

In 2004, Janet Jackson had been famous for something like 30 years. She had 5 albums in a row from 1986 to 2001 go Triple Platinum (selling something like 30 million units in the process). All her albums from Control forward were pretty well reviewed. Did everyone in 2004 just say, "Oh...yea...she actually sucks," because that seems crazy to me.

Their careers went in different directions because Viacom decided to blame Janet Jackson and blacklist her while Justin Timberlake was given a pass.

I dunno. What you're saying about Viacom certainly could be largely responsible for her downfall. Who really don't knows what goes on with the music industry, politics and all.

I do know that just about every artist- even ones who have sold millions of records- eventually just kind of fall out of favor and eventually don't sell nearly as many records as they used to.

There are things we just don't know. The Jackson's are some weird people. Maybe she just went all Lauren Hill or cat Stevens on us.

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