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Common Sense Note

A few key words and two very sexual songs ("Moist" and "Warmth") earned DAMITA JO a parental advisory sticker. There is supposedly an edited version available, which turns out to be nearly impossible to find. Still, this CD is tamer than most parental advisory-labeled music.

You may want to ask your teens why they think Janet is trying so hard to be sexy. How much does an artist's image affect how his or her popularity?

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Common Sense Review

Reviewed By: Kathi Kamen Goldmark

The cover features a coyly posed Janet Jackson, airbrushed and topless, sporting a wink and a smile. The sleek and glossy DAMITA JO is fundamentally a makeout record--with just enough explicit lyrics to earn a parental advisory sticker. An edited version is supposedly available, but extremely difficult to find. (According to a few record store clerks we talked to, retailers often order only one edited copy--which they use to play over the store's loudspeaker system--meaning there are no edited CDs available for purchase, so what's the point?)

On DAMITA JO, smoothly perfectionist arrangements set off Janet Jackson's sweet, breathy vocals nicely. But this 22-track CD gets monotonous pretty fast. It's a little too much of Janet trying too hard to be everything for everybody, and a little too much information about her sex life to be, well, genuinely sexy. Janet seems obsessed with showing us all the "real Damita Jo" (the CD is titled after her middle name), and in the process seems to forget the art of the tease.

With some judicious editing, this could have been a terrific album, but the mish-mosh of musical styles (funk, rock, soul/R&B, even a bit of country-western), no doubt intended to impress us with the artist's versatility, ends up coming across as unfocused. Janet Jackson is way sexier when she's not trying quite so hard.

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