10. Janet JacksonControl
Again, with Janet Jackson, I saw myself represented. I know she’s not Latino, but when you see people who aren’t white men on the TV and on the radio, it’s super-inspiring. My parents loved Janet Jackson, and this was album was played alongside Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine on our family stereo. It’s a super-personal album – she’s talking about her liberation, her personal life, her self-actualisation – and it was just super-empowering to sing along to the lyrics of ‘Control’, ‘Nasty’ and ‘When I Think Of You’, these beautiful tracks. And when I think of this album, it’s directly linked in my mind to Rhythm Nation, the record she put out right after that, a concept album talking about political issues. They’re songs of the time – the only way you don’t like that music or don’t know about it is if culturally you didn’t connect with it. I can’t imagine anyone from my cultural background for whom Janet Jackson isn’t super-influential – as influential as Michael, if not more. She was an idiosyncratic artist.
Also, this record is what got me into hip-hop. When you get obsessed with something, you find the things that are parallel with it. So, in 1986, that meant Run DMC. They had put Raising Hell out the same year, and that was their crossover record with Aerosmith on it. Our family had just come to the states, and Run DMC was literally my first English-speaking concert – previously, I’d just been to Salsa concerts. I went to see Run DMC at the Coliseum in South Carolina, with the Beastie Boys were opening up for them. This concert was the first time I saw punks – I remember seeing people with mohawks, and chains, and leather jackets, and my mind as blown. I didn’t know what it was! The person who had taken me to the concert was explaining it to me – “Oh, those are punks”. So Janet Jackson led me to Run DMC, Run DMC led me to Beastie Boys and discovering what punk was all about. And then, later, At The Drive-In signed to Grand Royal Records, and Beastie Boys’ Mike D became my friend.
After that concert, I wrote a letter to Run DMC and to the Beasties, saying I wanted to go on tour with them. It had been explained to me that they were on tour, that’s why they were playing here for one night, and I came back from the concert and said, ‘I wanna go on tour with Run DMC and Beastie Boys’. Rather than just say ‘No’ or ‘You can’t do that’, my dad said, ‘Well, first you need to write them and tell them that…’ Basically, he was telling me, ‘You got to take things step-by-step – here’s the first step, in order to achieve your goal…’ So I recreated their logos using construction paper and sent it to them, and wrote, ‘I could do cool art like this for you if I was on tour with you…’ Obviously, they never wrote back, and obviously Mike D laughed when I told him that story, and said, ‘Yeah, we never read those letters…’ But it was a super-important moment, one that opened everything up for me.
