When Janet Jackson announced in August that her latest Strip residency, Janet Jackson: Las Vegas, would launch the week of New Year’s Eve it seemed as if she had been away from Vegas forever. She hadn’t, as she’s played numerous but mostly private events since the end of the pandemic. She played the last show of her previous Strip residency in August 2019 before COVID canceled any plans for continuance.
Las Vegas will feel like home to Jackson this week when she plays Resorts World Las Vegas, after she spent most of 2024 on her global Together Again Tour, which she kicked off in March with three concerts in Honolulu before heading to Asia for shows in the Philippines and Japan. She wrapped the North American leg in Phoenix before finishing the European shows Oct. 10 at Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome.
Jackson has had a fair amount of time to reimagine her stage show, or reconstruct it altogether, for 5,000 fans at a time inside Resorts World Theatre. She had been opening shows with “Night” from 2015’s Unbreakable, following up with a handful of tracks from her post-2000 catalog such as “2nite,” “Rock With U” and “Slolove” in a nearly 40-song set.
If one had to place bets on what to expect from Janet Jackson: Las Vegas, odds would favor an epic length that pivots from Together Again by starting things off with killer dance numbers, say “Rhythm Nation” followed by “When I Think of You,” before segueing into a structure that allows Jackson to tell her life story though lyrics, music and choreography, rather than let others tell it for her.
The third-youngest daughter of the Jackson clan first sang in Vegas at age 7 with sisters Rebbie and La Toya at the old MGM Grand (now Horseshoe Las Vegas). Her future fans watched her grow up with roles on sitcoms Good Times and Diff’rent Strokes before she began her recording career.
It wasn’t until she teamed with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis that she found chart success. Jam and Lewis had just emancipated themselves from the scripted-reality roles they played as part of Prince’s musical family in The Time and applied their experience with biographical influence on creativity along with next-level production to the project with Jackson.
The result was a groundbreaking album that laid the blueprint for New Jack Swing and made Jackson a superstar. The title cut from 1986’s Control and follow-up single “Nasty” were both Top Five singles, but on MTV, Jackson was No. 1. Choreography by Paula Abdul raised the bar for videos for dance music, which Jackson kept raising with subsequent videos for “Rhythm Nation” and “The Pleasure Principle.”
Those songs from 1989’s Rhythm Nation 1814 demonstrated Jackson’s shift from introspection to concern with worldly matters and appreciation of sensuality. Those themes would occupy Jackson from then on along with heartbreak (1993’s “That’s the Way Love Goes”) and desire (2001’s “All for You”). One way of another, Jackson has an ongoing musical story to tell and has the ideal platform to tell it with via her headlining Strip residency.
Resorts World Las Vegas. 8:30 p.m. Dec. 30-31 and Jan. 3-4, starting at $79 plus tax and fee. axs.com
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