Why Janet Jackson Recorded Rhythm Nation in Minnesota

Thirty years ago, Janet Jackson spent the winter in the Twin Cities, making snow angels in Edina and hanging out at Calhoun Square. The result of her artistic residency? One of the greatest pop albums ever recorded in Minnesota. How did it happen? And what does it sound like now?

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Jellybean Johnson didn’t intend to make “a protest record” when he entered the studio to help record Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. “I just thought it was funky,” he says today.

Of course, it turned out to be both. Released 30 years ago this month, Jackson’s fourth album was her second recorded in the Twin Cities with producer-writers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Jellybean, who was working for the team at their newly purchased Flyte Tyme Studios, in Edina, produced Rhythm Nation’s stomping rock hit “Black Cat.” 

Front-loaded with songs of social awareness, the album showcased a young woman feeling and flexing her ascending cultural power, right as artists like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions were bringing hip-hop to its politically charged peak. One of Janet’s key decisions in packaging the album and its videos was to keep her wardrobe a simple black, to signify both seriousness and racial pride. 

Modeled on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On—“My favorite album of all time,” Jimmy Jam told Rolling Stone—Rhythm Nation 1814 also presented an accessible dance-floor burner. Seven of its singles would reach the top five, an incredible feat. (Not even her older brother’s Thriller had managed that.) 

The number in the album’s title, Janet told US magazine in 1990, reflected her ambition to create a kind of “national anthem”: Francis Scott Key had written “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1814. “R” and “N” also represent the 18th and 14th letters in the alphabet—purely a coincidence, she said at the time. Maybe.

Looked at three decades later, the album sounds (and looks) like a touchstone of modern pop. When Lady Gaga took a turn for the serious with her album Born This Way, critics compared it to Rhythm Nation 1814. 

The album also stands as a definitive capsule of its time—not to mention place. The recording captures not only Jam and Lewis at their commercial and creative peak, but stands out as a zenith of Twin Cities pop itself. 

As Janet exultantly shouts in the middle of one of those hits, “Escapade”: “Minneapolis!” 

Rhythm Nation 1814 is both a Janet Jackson album and, unmistakably, a Jam and Lewis album. 

Keyboardist James Harris III—Jimmy Jam—and bassist Terry Lewis first met during the summer of 1972 through Upward Bound, a low-income educational-opportunity program. They passed through a handful of Minneapolis bands before becoming anchors of The Time, whose three albums were largely (though hardly entirely) the work of Prince and frontman Morris Day. But as a live unit, The Time put fear even into their purple Übermensch. 

Quietly, Jam and Lewis were developing their own material on the side. With a Casio synthesizer and a four-track recorder, the duo made their first demo tape in the summer of 1982 while living together in a one-room apartment in Los Angeles. (“And I mean one room,” Jam told Musician.) When Prince fired them for missing a Time show, Jam and Lewis were working on “Just Be Good to Me,” soon to be their first top-hit R&B smash. They set up shop as Flyte Tyme Studios in a former daycare center at 4330 Nicollet Avenue. (Today, it’s the home of remodeling company House Lift.)

Janet Jackson had been a big fan of The Time. She’d seen them perform and worked with their guitarist, Jesse Johnson, to oversee part of 1984’s Dream Street, her second LP. Until that time, Janet had been better known as a TV actor, from Good Times and Fame. She’d made two teen-oriented albums, but she had built-in competition from her brother Michael, with whom Janet was especially close. 

In ’84, while her brothers were on the “Victory Tour,” the 18-year-old Janet eloped with James DeBarge, a member of another Motown-bred sibling group. The marriage was quickly annulled, but it signaled her determination to go her own way.

Jam and Lewis, for their part, had noticed Janet’s moxie. “I used to watch her on TV doing the Mae West impressions on the Jacksons’ television show,” Jam told writer Chris Williams in 2014. “And you could see that she had a lot of attitude, and that attitude wasn’t coming across on her records . . . We were used to dealing with Morris Day and Prince. We were used to people exuding attitude on a record.”

Janet was skeptical of the pairing at first. When A&M Records execs played her the duo’s most recent project—an album with live orchestration for the decorous singer Patti Austin—Janet initially balked. 

“We had to assure her that her record was going to have her own sound on it,” Jam recalled. 

To ensure that happened, they put Janet’s input at the center of Control (released in early 1986)—from its autobiographical lyrics to the music itself. “We forced her to play [keyboard] parts on the record,” Jam told Musician in 1986. “She’d be saying, ‘It’s okay, get someone else,’ and we’d go, ‘No, you play it.’ And by the end of the sessions she was really into it.” 

So was everyone else. Four of Control’s singles (“What Have You Done for Me Lately,” “Nasty,” “Control,” and “Let’s Wait Awhile”) reached the top five. “When I Think of You” went to number one, with “The Pleasure Principle” siring one of the most memorable videos of the era, thanks to some fancy footwork involving a chair. 

There would be a lot riding on Control’s follow-up, beyond the principals’ sudden reps as hit makers. Near the end of January 1988, the Star Tribune reported that “negotiations over the producers’ fee have not been completed.” The paper later related a rumor that the producers had “received more than $1 million” for their services on Rhythm Nation. Control had taken six weeks to make, start to finish; Rhythm Nation 1814 would take six months.

Much of that had been a matter of timing: Jackson arrived in Minneapolis in the middle of a particularly blustery winter. When Janet showed up to Flyte Tyme, “she threw herself to the ground and started making a snow angel,” Jam later recalled. “She told us, ‘I’ve always wanted to do that!’ We were like, ‘Get in here. You’re going to catch a cold.’”

The weather differed sharply from Janet’s hometown, but Minneapolis and Los Angeles had in common a surfeit of indoor shopping malls. Janet’s favorite, a few miles northwest from Flyte Tyme, was Calhoun Square, where she and her producers regularly dined at Figlio, the Italian restaurant that occupied the corner of Lake Street and Hennepin Avenue from 1985 to 2009. (The unrelated Fig + Farro fills the space today.) 

“She knew everyone at Calhoun Square on a first-name basis,” Jam told the Star Tribune in 1990. 

The producers, meanwhile, liked to spend evenings at Williams Uptown Pub just a block away—particularly the funk-fueled Ladies’ Night every Tuesday. (Williams is still around, though Ladies’ Night isn’t.) And, of course, they frequented First Avenue downtown.

Weather aside, the sessions began auspiciously. Jam and Lewis had already cooked up a track for Janet; Jimmy played it for her immediately. “Wow! Is that for me? I love that!” she enthused. “It was a great way to start,” he said. The song was called “Miss You Much”—a clear-as-day hit single, the first of many to come.

By that point, Flyte Tyme wasn’t just a two-man operation. Jam and Lewis had used their newfound scale to hire a small crew of writers and producers—particularly their fellow Time men. Keyboardist Monte Moir had written “The Pleasure Principle” for Control. And on Rhythm Nation, the team enlisted The Time drummer Jellybean Johnson to flesh out the arrangement of “Black Cat.” (Janet herself penned the lyrics and the central riff.)

“I wanted her to be able to compete with her brother because of ‘Beat It,’ ‘Dirty Diana,’ and all that stuff,” Johnson says today. “I’m a rock and roller at heart, even though I’m black. And Terry and Jimmy, that’s not really their cup of tea. That riff was on a piano, if you can believe that. So I turned it into this big rock anthem and stuff. I told her I wanted her to sound like a rock goddess on it, which she did by the time we got done.”

To get the right sound, Johnson rented a Marshall amp from Knut-Koupee, the now-defunct instrument dealer, then located a few miles south of Flyte Tyme HQ, in Richfield. The riff was played by Dave Barry (not the humor columnist), who was recently the guitarist in the house band for NBC’s The Voice.

Even the era’s hard-rock royalty were impressed. “All the heavy-metal cats lost their damn minds when they heard that: Mötley Crüe, Ratt, all of these guys. They couldn’t believe Janet Jackson was doing some hard rock like that. She has, basically, a soft voice. My whole thing was to get the grit out.” 

Johnson put the kibosh on boyfriends or girlfriends in the studio—“that’s a no-no.” 

The album’s framing device—a spoken set of eight interludes, a call to arms that gave the album some conceptual heft—arrived well into the album’s making. During studio downtime, Janet and the producers would watch cable TV, going back and forth between music videos on MTV, VH-1, and BET, and often-unsettling news updates on CNN. In May 1988, the headlines included a report from Winnetka, Illinois, of a young woman who’d killed an 8-year-old at a local school and wounded five others. She took hostages in a nearby house, then committed suicide. 

“Watching music videos on one side and watching atrocities on the other,” Jam told Rolling Stone. “Somehow they all merged together.” 

Lewis had been out looking at carpet samples for the new studio he and Jam were designing in Edina. When he came back to the studio, Janet and Jam importuned him to help them write a song about the tragedy. Lewis finished the lyrics of “Livin’ in a World (They Didn’t Make)” in 10 minutes, then asked, “So, do you think this carpet goes with this wallpaper?” (The rest of the crew then shushed him out of the room.)

The title of “The Knowledge” came from a taxi ride Jam and Lewis took in London. There, cabbies become licensed only by acquiring “the knowledge,” an intricate familiarity with every street in the capital. The sound of the title track (“Join voices in protest / To social injustice / A generation full of courage / Come forth with me”) came to Jam while he was eating dinner in town, and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” came on the restaurant’s PA. When he finished his meal, Jam headed back to Flyte Tyme and sampled the two-bar guitar riff from the song’s breakdown. 

Jellybean Johnson cites the musical and lyrical influence of James Brown and George Clinton on Jam and Lewis, Prince, and himself. “A lot of politics from these people,” he says. 

Janet took her newly adopted role as an oracle seriously. “We have so little time to solve these problems,” she told Essence. “I want people to realize the urgency. I want to grab their attention . . . It pleases me when the kids say my stuff is kickin’, but it pleases me even more when they listen to the lyrics.”

Released in September 1989, Rhythm Nation 1814 was the fourth number-one album that year to be recorded, at least in part, in the Twin Cities. The others were Prince’s Batman soundtrack; Fine Young Cannibals’ The Raw & The Cooked (co-produced by David Z, a regular Prince engineer); and Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl (featuring tracks helmed by local producer Oliver Leiber).

What was in the water, anyway? There was, of course, the post–Purple Rain gold rush. When that album topped the charts for six months in 1984–85, a flood of bands moved to Minneapolis to seek similar fortune. The 1985 signing of both Hüsker Dü and The Replacements to major-label contracts played a role as well. So did the 1985 opening of Musictech, the groundbreaking music school in Minneapolis (it later moved to St. Paul). Suddenly, both musicians and producers were flocking to the Twin Cities at the same time as the music industry was paying attention. 

One of the first beneficiaries would be Paula Abdul, who’d choreographed Janet’s videos from Control. Jam told the Strib that Janet had “taken Paula Abdul’s Laker Girls moves and turned them into a dance phenomenon and started a [recording] career for Paula, basically. Obviously, everyone has benefited from the result of the collaborations.”

That list would, of course, include Jam and Lewis. Concurrent with the release of Rhythm Nation, the producers opened their new Flyte Tyme studio at 4100 West 76th Street, in Edina. Construction had begun in June of 1988. The new space—a nondescript yellow former office-supply warehouse—featured “three recording studios, a mixing room, a rehearsal studio, and 7,000 square feet of offices,” the Star Tribune reported. 

The new recording console cost $500,000 and featured “48 channels, each of which is the equivalent of a Macintosh II computer.” 

Jam said, “The studio is not an ego statement. We think it will be a hedge against the down period for me and Terry.” 

Janet would go on to find critical and commercial success through her next two collaborations with Jam and Lewis: janet (1993) and The Velvet Rope (1997), both more introspective (and sexual) albums. Later, she would experience national embarrassment when her wardrobe malfunctioned—a term that seems to demand scare quotes—during a 2004 Super Bowl halftime show with Justin Timberlake. In recent years, it would seem she has lived in the shadow of her brother Michael’s death and disgrace. The 30th anniversary of Rhythm Nation allows us to appreciate an artist still free of those burdens: Minneapolis Janet. 

The week before the album was released—and six months before she hit the road for the first time—Flyte Tyme threw an opening party with a guest list of 500. Local high rollers turned up: business tycoon Irwin Jacobs, Twins owner Carl Pohlad, and the producing team of L.A. and Babyface—Jam and Lewis’s heirs apparent. The demure singer came out, too, but kept to herself. 

“Singer Janet Jackson was there but didn’t mingle,” Cheryl Johnson wrote in the Star Tribune. “She spent a good part of the evening sitting on a couch captivated by videos and giggling when it was one of hers.” 

If you can’t remember that feeling from Rhythm Nation, it’s probably time to listen again. 

Mpls.St.Paul Daily Edit

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