FEATURE:
Groovelines
Janet Jackson – All for You
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ONE of Janet Jackson’s…
biggest songs turns twenty-five on 6th March. All for You is a classic. A stunning song from one of the greatest artists ever. I am focusing on it for this Groovelines. The All for You album turns twenty-five on 16th April. The lead single from Jackson’s seventh studio album, there are a few different versions of the song. The L.P. version is over six minutes. The C.D. album version is 5:29. The radio edit and single mix are around 4:29. So you do get these different takes depending on which version you hear. I will come to some reviews for All for You. Written by Janet Jackson, James Harris III, Terry Lewis, Wayne Garfield, David Romani and Mauro Malavasi, it reached number one in the U.S. and was a big chart success around the world. It is no surprise given how instant the song is. One of those tracks that hits you right away. In their The Number Ones feature, Stereogum explored Janet Jackson's All for You in 2022. Even though they hinted at some drawbacks and were balanced, there were positives from their review:
“As a new century dawned, Janet Jackson was still thriving. She'd just divorced her second husband René Elizondo Jr., but that divorce hadn't pushed her toward making heavier or more maudlin music. Instead, with the first single from her seventh album, Janet dug deep into the history of upbeat, joyous, forget-your-troubles dance music. The lyrics to "All For You" probably would've been too horny to fly in the late '70s or early '80s, but the music could've sprung straight from her brother Michael's classic Off The Wall. In the summer of 2001, Janet's flirty club-jam kept a kung-fu grip on the top of the Hot 100. At the time, nobody knew that something was ending.
When Janet Jackson came out with her All For You album, it had been nearly four years since her previous record, the deep and exploratory artistic triumph The Velvet Rope. Janet had spent a long time touring in between albums, and she'd also starred in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, scoring another chart-topper with the soundtrack song "Doesn't Really Matter." She'd never really stopped being busy, even during her divorce. When Janet got to work on the next album with her regular collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, she wanted to leave behind the introspection of The Velvet Rope. She wanted to make something fun.
The song "All For You," like many of the hits from that era, started with a sample. When Janet Jackson was planning out the All For You album, she got together with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and they all listened to older songs for inspiration. Jimmy Jam pulled out a record that was new to Janet: "The Glow Of Love," a 1980 single from the Italian disco project Change. In Fred Bronson's Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Jimmy Jam says, "She didn't know that song, and I was really shocked. I was DJing at the time that record was out, so that was a huge song in my life and one that I have always wanted to sample and bring back for people to hear."
Change was essentially a studio project. A group of producers based in Bologna had the idea to put together a rotating cast of musicians. They would write the songs and record the instrumental tracks in Italy, and then they would go to New York and find American singers to record the lead vocals. For "The Glow Of Life," the title track from Change's debut album, the lead singer was a not-yet-famous Luther Vandross, who was still singing commercial jingles and doing session backup vocal work at the time. "The Glow Of Love" didn't chart, but it still marked a breakout moment for Vandross, who released his debut album Never Too Much a year later. (Change's highest-charting single, 1980's "A Lover's Holiday," peaked at #40. Luther Vandross didn't sing on that one.).
Janet Jackson hadn't heard "The Glow Of Love" before Jimmy Jam played it, but she knew Luther Vandross. They'd worked together. In 1992, Janet and Luther recorded the duet "The Best Things In Life Are Free" for the soundtrack of the Damon Wayans movie Mo' Money. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis produced it, and Bell Biv DeVoe and Ralph Tresvant sang backup. ("The Best Things In Life Are Free" peaked at #10. It's a 7. Luther Vandross' highest-charting single is the 1994 version of "Endless Love" that he recorded with Mariah Carey. That one peaked at #2, and it's a 5.) Janet also trusted her instincts, and "The Glow Of Love" made her want to dance.
Change might've been an Italian disco project, but they didn't belong to the mechanized, synth-heavy subgenre known as Italo-disco. Instead, Change were shooting for the same funky, limber live-band disco-funk sound as Chic. Their whole style was essentially a high-level Chic ripoff, and that's not a complaint. Chic were fucking incredible, and Change did a good job ripping their sound off. Janet Jackson co-produced "All For You" with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and they really just embellished on the groove from "The Glow Of Love." "All For You" has extra synths and harder-hitting drum machines, but Janet kept the playful sonic back-and-forth from "The Glow Of Love" -- the scratchy guitars, the strutting bassline, the great little descending piano riff. But Janet didn't keep the "Glow Of Love" melody or the mystical woo-woo lyrics. She had something else in mind.
Janet Jackson was dating for the first time in nearly a decade. She'd been famous before she met René Elizondo Jr., but that was nothing new. Janet had been famous since she was a little kid. As a newly single woman in her mid-thirties, though, Janet was a whole lot more famous than she'd been the last time around. She'd noticed that men were shy about approaching her. You can only imagine, right? How do you hit on a global superstar? What's your opening line? Janet wrote most of the lyrics for "All For You," and the whole point of the song is that you, the person being addressed, need to stop overthinking things and shoot your shot. Janet wants to have fun, and if you don't say anything to her, you'll miss out on that fun.
The line from "All For You" that everyone remembers is the raunchiest one: "Got a nice package, all right/ Guess I'm gonna have to ride tonight." You don't really need me to explain this one, do you? Janet Jackson is horny. She wants to fuck. She's out here evaluating dudes' crotches and then proceeding accordingly. I like how casual that line is; it's almost a shrug. At the time, it was pleasantly shocking to hear a pop star just straight-up singing about a man's dick size on a #1 hit, not cloaking it in any kind of innuendo. But why should it be? This column has covered plenty of songs that involve men lovingly describing women's asses. Janet Jackson should get to do her version of that, too.
The "nice package" line definitely stands out on "All For You." In mixing and arranging the track, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis put that line right up front, a cappella, working under the assumption that a new Janet Jackson song should really announce itself when it comes on the radio. But the "nice package" line isn't really the point of "All For You." Instead, "All For You" is a lighthearted, flirty song -- more about the exhilaration of being out in the world, looking for connection, than about the physical sensation that comes with that connection. On the first verse, Janet is almost teasing the guy: "I see you staring out the corner of my eye/ You seem uneasy, want to approach me, throw me a line/ But then something inside you grabs you, says, 'Who am I?'/ I know exactly 'cause it happens with all the guys." Your whole bashful act is nothing new to Janet Jackson. She's seen it all before.
Janet Jackson laughs a lot on "All For You." She might have the all-time greatest on-record laugh, a weightless and joyous sound about halfway between giggle and cackle. When she's not laughing, she's still smiling. "All For You" is a sort of fantasy wonderland of a song. The track doesn't admit to any possibility of darkness. Instead, it's Janet inviting you into a magical experience: "Tell me I'm the only one/ Soon, we'll be having fun." She's just waiting for you to let her know that you're into her”.
When assessing and reflecting on the album in 2021, this feature discussed the title track of All for You. Even if they see it as slightly lightweight, it was this essential Janet Jackson track. Ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to look inside this classic:
“Right from the start, “All for You” transports fans back to the ‘80s when acid-washed jeans were all the rage, having a My Buddy doll was less creepy than today, and MTV played actual music videos all day.
The upbeat come-on is staged on opposite ends of the dance floor of a late-night spot, where Jackson has locked eyes with a timid romantic prospect. Her frothy and sunny tone here stirred as much interest in the pop sphere as popular teen sensations at the time, while her youthful appearance in the music video was akin to them, if not better.
Hearing the nostalgic beckon now, Jackson was doing everything imaginable to get this shy boy-toy, who is allusively well-endowed, to get him over to her side and back to her place for a bedroom rodeo. But she couldn’t blanket her celebrity status enough to break down the imposing walls of intimidation.
She tried to lessen his coyness on the second verse, singing, “Don’t try to be all clever, cute, or even sly / Don’t have to work that hard / Just be yourself and let that be your guide.”
The Dave Meyers-directed video opens with a shot of Jackson and a male passenger on a superficial train headed nowhere fast. At the next stop, Jackson, styled in trendy denim and a multi-colored halter top, joins a troop of female commuters on the railway platform to dance in unison.
The fashion and choreography evolve in other scenes like outside a 2D boardwalk and a resemblance of downtown Hollywood where a billboard of her showing her almost bare derrière is in lights. She spots the male transit once again in the club, getting a final wave in before she disappears in the night.
By the looks of it, the clean-cut specimen never found his way across the club and in the section of the smoking hot Jackson, but the pop phenom found herself immersed in acres of unrivaled accolades and success for “All for You.”
In March 2001, Jackson had the highest-debuting single (No. 14) on the Hot 100 since Billboard amended its rules for tracks without retail value to chart, thanks to airplay from an early leak in February.
Out the gate, the album’s title track had cross-format appeal, proving itself when it simultaneously controlled radio formats as diverse as pop, rhythmic and urban in one week. According to radio veteran Kevin McCabe, this was the best airplay move for a song of any kind, dubbing her as the Queen of Radio at the time.
Two weeks before retailers across the world stocked their shelves with the album All for You, the single unseated Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” from the Hot 100 hilltop, making it Jackson’s tenth chart-topper. It also headed other charts like the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks and the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Sales after tallying close to 30,000 in sales at core retailers.
Jackson enjoyed a jubilant seven-week run at the Hot 100 summit, sending her in the Billboard history books that year as the longest-running hit. She was the first solo female artist to lead the chart since Christina Aguilera’s “Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You)” in October 2000”.
I am going to end with a Wikipedia and their article of All for You. Their section where they spotlight the critical reaction. It is clear that there was a lot of love for this song. One of Janet Jackson’s very best. One that I remember coming out in 2001, it has lost none of its spark and brilliance. Always wonderful watching live versions where Janet Jackson performs the song:
“All for You" was described by Chuck Taylor from Billboard as a "veritable vitamin shot in the arm for the airwaves", and "as playful and joyous as the best from Jackson's deep uptempo catalog". He also wrote that the song "audaciously ignores top 40's current trend toward strict R&B inflection" and was "mainstream party pop at its best". Laviea Thomas of Clash commented that "from the funky bass plucks to her smooth vocal delivery", the song was one of Jackson's signature up-tempo tracks. Mark Lindores from Classic Pop wrote that the track was part of the "feelgood songs which are the beating heart of the album". Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis praised the song for "swirl[ing] on the dizzying energy of a disco-era sample". Ethan Brown from New York opined that Jackson was at her best "riding great samples" from the disco era, while Wall of Sound's Gary Gruff wrote that it employs "old-school conventions without lapsing into retrograde". According to Cragg of The Guardian, the track "luxuriates in its post-disco influences, while lyrically it's Jackson at her cheeky best". For Cyd Jaymes from Dotmusic, "All for You" was a "dreamy slice of supremely steamy R&B", as well as "the soundtrack to some sweaty summer lovin'". Bianca Gracie, writing for Grammy.com, noted that Jackson's joyride was "near-tangible" on the song, and was "pure sunshine captured in a song". Stephen Thomas Erlewine, senior editor for AllMusic, said that the song would maintain Jackson and her producers' reputation as the "leading lights of contemporary urban soul". Piers Martin of NME called the song a "faultless funk affair”.
On 6th March, the lead single from All for You turns twenty-five. Its amazing tittle track is a gem. In 2021, The Guardian ranked it twelfth and said this: “Keen to return to the dancefloor after the introspection of The Velvet Rope, All for You feels like a throwback to the effortless, loved-up optimism of her 80s imperial phase. Dismissed by some critics as “frothy”, it luxuriates in its post-disco influences, while lyrically it’s Jackson at her cheeky best, not least when she shrugs at a guy with “a nice package” and says “guess I’m gonna have to ride it tonight”. Royalty Exchange placed it fifth in 2024: “With its upbeat and playful vibe, "All for You" became a summer anthem in the early 2000s. The song’s infectious groove and carefree lyrics made it a massive hit, earning Janet a Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording. It marked a new era of Janet’s career, further cementing her pop legacy”. Although there might not be celebration or spotlight of this track, All for You deserves applause ahead of 6th March. It is a true classic from…
A music icon.