Not many artists can claim they have been performing in Las Vegas for 50 years. With the opening of her latest residency at the Resorts World Theatre on Monday, Janet Jackson celebrated her golden anniversary on the Strip — she first took the stage alongside the entire family, including her brothers, The Jackson 5, in 1974 at the MGM. Mother Katherine Jackson and Tyler Perry were in the sold-out crowd for opening night.
“Janet Jackson: Las Vegas” is the follow-up to 2019’s “Metamorphosis” at Park MGM and closely follows the playbook of her 2023-24 “Together Again” tour, with night one carrying some major surprises with both live debuts and songs not performed live in many years. While some artists stack their Vegas residencies with the greatest hits, Jackson’s setlist is more like an encyclopedia of her career — two hours, 43 songs, iconic choreography and a recall of many of the fashion moments that made her a pop culture icon.
A risk-taker since she threw on her first double-breasted blazer for 1986’s Control, Ms. Jackson defies the residency formula. She takes the slow-burn approach into her big hits, starting off the night cycling through snippets from seven lesser-known tracks, ranging from Janet‘s “Throb” to Discipline’s “2Nite” before dropping a widely recognizable song, the The Velvet Rope’s “Go Deep.”
While the audience was undoubtedly waiting for a big hit to kick it all off, Jackson shows us she still does as she pleases, and “JJ: LV” establishes itself as a long haul, evocative of the same ebbs and flows of her career, creating a progression of content that organically matches multiple decades of shifting genres, interests, trends and life moments. While “Metamorphosis” carried less production and more storytelling from the star, “Janet Jackson: Las Vegas” lets the lyrics, moves, creative direction, costumes and pyro create the narrative.
The Biggest Surprises
Jackson threw some wow into the set list for this Las Vegas turn. With 11 studio albums, she has a lot of material from which to choose, and with no new music in almost a decade, Jackson dug into the crates for some gems that the die-hard fans swooned over.
After Janet’s “Love Will Never Do Without You” — which showcased clips from the black-and-white desert video with Antonio Sabato Jr. — she wowed with 1995’s “Twenty Foreplay,” from her greatest-hits album Design of a Decade, not performed since 2017; she then quickly transitioned into 2004’s “I Want You”— co-written by Kanye West and John Legend and co-produced by West — from Damita Jo. Several songs later, she threw in the title track from perhaps her most critically acclaimed and introspective album, The Velvet Rope, not performed since 1999. The audience heard the live debut of “Broken Hearts Heal” from 2015’s Discipline and the most historic track of the night, 1982’s “Young Love,” which she hasn’t done live since 2010.
