We’ve got our first guest writer on BiS this week as Mia explores Janet Jackson’s Got ‘Til It’s Gone and its accompanying music video as an anti-apartheid anthem. Enjoy!
The four familiar synth chords reverberate through the speakers; they patiently sit behind the 90BPM tempo, waiting for their cue once the song begins. The vinyl needle interrupts the sonic beginnings of the track and Joni Mitchell sings her haunting sample from Big Yellow Taxi: “you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.” The G major key paints an acoustic landscape for 4 minutes and 2 seconds. I am at ease. This song is sensory; even before the video is introduced, there is a visual landscape that is painted in the same composition as the acoustic. What’s intriguing about this feeling, however, is that it was not necessarily the intended emotion for Jackson’s listener.
Got ‘Til It’s Gone was released in 1997 under Virgin Records Music Label, and ultimately won a Grammy at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards. This music video is a sound stage for acoustic and visual languages of resistance. Jackson communicates articulations of Africa as a site of cultural and political identity through marrying music, photography, print culture, and film. Here, I am intrigued with how Jackson took music video as a form of cultural protest, and ultimately created an anti-apartheid anthem for the 1990s and thereafter.
The apartheid regime in South Africa began in 1948 and lasted until 1994. Protests opposing these nuclear systems of discrimination were realised through a myriad of ways in Africa, and later in the West. Protest music soon after the apartheid began reflected society’s need to declare opposition culturally and politically against forced relocation; the sonic and lyrical content being created at the time began to tonally reflect the environments that it was created in.
The central landscape of Got ‘Til it’s Gone is a re-creation of an apartheid-era South African dance hall. The figures within it dance to Jackson’s voice, whilst Q-Tip recalls Joni Mitchell’s sample refrain from her single Big Yellow Taxi (1970) over the top. The clothing is mimetic of 1970s fashion, showcasing bold bell bottoms and a vivid colour palette for the backdrop to Jackson’s voice. The other stage setting of the video is a photographer’s studio space. Here, Mark Romanek (the video’s director) and Janet Jackson have taken direct inspiration from Malian photographers Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, and Samuel Fosso’s 1975 Bangui photography studio. The dancers and party guests go to this studio throughout the video to take their own self-portraits. As each photograph is taken, the screen flashes. Specific images by Fosso are recreated and recurated by the studio’s new subjects. In referencing African photographers in this way, Jackson draws out different registers of photography and gives new sonic language to and around the visual.
This music video encourages us to think about how objects and music can act on us in ways that are not purely visual. Got ‘Til it’s Gone situates the histories of photography in their past which was shaped by the racialized power play of subject and object polarities, whilst simultaneously considering how shifting diasporic notions of identities can be negotiated visually through photography. It is through this that Jackson began to shift the codes of the genre.
The acoustic and visual landscape that’s being merged here subverts the consumption of music and visual culture, and instead suggests cultural exchange as a continuation of unity, rather than a disruption of it. References to Drum Magazine (the South African picture magazine that was the first to unite visual vocabularies of continuity with sonic ones, curated by Black men and women, for Black men and women in the 1950s) further emphasises this. This cultural exchange of visual and auditory allows a vivid presentation of video as a medium of sensory apparatus to suggest how the construction of Africa could be imagined when united on the same temporal horizon.
Perhaps we should listen to images as a part of this mutual exchange. Music videos can/should be read as cultural artifacts and agents of circulation. Through this music video, Jackson is allowing us to hear photography. The auditory is integral to lived experiences, and if seeing is not reading, visual and acoustic landscapes don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Ultimately, Janet Jackson offers a unique contribution to Africa as a site of cultural and political imagination and fantasy defined by new mediations of visual and sonic language. Jackson focuses on historical print culture, transcultural sonic influence, and a rich tapestry of African photographic references to assert her solidarity with the freedom of South Africa, both in its diasporic past and in its multitude of imagined future possibilities.
Not only does this make space for a powerful piece of acoustic, sonic and visual landscapes, but it also makes space for a song that is impossible to skip.
Thank you to Mia for this fascinating piece.