She's divorced — for a second time — and being sued for $10 million by her latest ex. But Janet Jackson's not letting that get her down; "I feel so free … Now I see/ The single life's for me," she exults in "Come on Get Up," one of the several lust-lorn down-and-dirty ditties that populate her seventh album.
Over the course of a too-long 73 minutes, Jackson continues the sexual liberation she began on her last couple of albums with an unapologetic appetite, from the pillow talk of "When We Oooo" to the explicitly worded kama sutra of "Would You Mind"; even the title track has introduced the term "nice package" into the vocabulary of portions of the populace who may be a bit too young for it. Jackson doesn't spend all of All for You in bed, mind you — just a lot of it. Elsewhere she's castigating ex-lovers in "You Ain't Right," "Truth," and "Son of a Gun (I Betcha Think This Song Is About You)," a collaboration with Carly Simon that quotes liberally from the latter's "You're So Vain."
But for all its emotional directness and prodigious length, there's a point on All for You where it all starts wear thin and Jackson's moments of celebration and vindictiveness seem played out rather than genuine, particularly as she winds through the messy arrangements of "Son of a Gun" and "Trust a Try." Would that she and her collaborators — longtime cohorts James "Jimmy Jam" Harris III and Terry Lewis, along with hip-hop auteur Rockwilder — applied some judicious editing so that All for You's best moments could really shine.
On "Come on Get Up," for instance, jungle rhythms percolate under a vintage Minneapolis soul groove to buoyant effect, while the bright acoustic guitar signature of America's "Ventura Highway" drives "Someone to Call My Lover" into a particularly sunny horizon. "You Ain't Right" offers an urgent, insistent bottom that recalls Jackson's Control days, while "Feels So Right," "Better Days," and the title track, which its Chic-style groove, employ old-school conventions without lapsing into retrograde. This isn't the first time a Jackson album has been burdened by over-ambition, but it's another opportunity to learn that more is not necessarily better.
— Gary Graff
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