How Janet Jackson’s nipple changed music forever
A few years ago, a friend of mine was walking through a mob of fans en route to the Euro 2020 football final when he witnessed a man drop his trousers, light a flare, and shove the flaming baton right up his bearded wheeto. Scarred by this troubling scene, my pal scurried on further down the road. Then, in a state of confused disbelief, he decided to risk recapitulating the trauma for the sake of re-establishing his sanity and searched: ‘England fan bum flare’ online. He wanted to see if it had really happened or if he had simply imagined it in an unfortunate state of Euro Fever delirium. He stood agog, an accidental sadist amid the hawking masses, watching a video of the horror play out once more. He has Janet Jackson‘s nipple to blame for this pre-game repeat of flaming barbarity.
England lost the game on penalties, but his lasting memory of that day is not the desperately young and fawn-like Bukayo Saka sending one tepidly towards the arms of Gianluigi Donnarumma, but rather this harrowing sight of a fully grown hooligan perverting his own dirty penny with a gushing flare. This is not the only time that sport has been eclipsed by a brief spectacle. Albeit much less scarring, most of the world can’t remember who won the Super Bowl in 2004 (or even care about it for that matter), but they do remember that a wardrobe malfunction broadcast Janet Jackson’s errand nipple around the world.
These days, as soon as a breaking slip like that happens, you know the video will, sadly, be online within an instant. But back in 2004, YouTube founder Jawed Karim was left trawling the web in search of this mythical Super Bowl moment. This gave the young up-start a great idea: What if there was an online video repository where you could simply search for this kind of thing and find it as quickly as your dial-up would allow? And just like that, ‘Nipplegate’ spawned YouTube.
At the time, Google were gearing up their own stuffy video search engine, and in an alternate universe – one where Justin Timberlake didn’t rip Jackson’s dress in an act of hat-peg revelation – we might have been left with a more sedate way of finding videos, but instead, YouTube – the light side of the internet – came to prominence. Naturally, the impacts of the site since then have been far-reaching, however, one area where YouTube has had a notable effect is the music industry.
For one, by very definition of the founding ‘Nipplegate’ debacle, it made music a more visual place. In fact, the song that typifies this is PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’. With 4.7billion views, this dance craze far eclipses more conventional ‘masterpieces’ like John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (282million views). With PSY, the dance and video are inseparable from the song. This fun and sense of comic pageantry brought K-pop to the masses and now the genre is one of the biggest in the world.
Within two years of the release of ‘Gangnam Style’ the most searched term on YouTube became “music”. Now, music videos make up 94 of the top 100 most viewed videos on the site. Vitally, alongside these videos are the thumbnails of related or recommended content. This allows you to judge a book by the cover and expand your musical horizons. This concept has resulted in millions of us finding a new favourite artist with one guided click.
And yet the algorithmic nature of this has also perhaps homogenised our individual tastes by sending us further down rabbit holes. In essence, personalised playlists have created a more divided music world. In the days of MTV, the station would have to broadcast videos from an array of genres to suit the varied tastes of the masses, whereas YouTube can tailor their content to an audience of one. This has perhaps made music more niche these days while also narrowing ‘scenes’ by making things too specific to catch on within a communal real-world group.
The site came along and blurred the milieu of culture-defining microcosms and dispersed them into the insignificant macrocosm of the world wide web. It’s not that little fads or pockets of sub-genres didn’t exist pre-YouTube, it’s just back then if you were deep into Dutch Gabber or an early convert to Krautrock then you wouldn’t find many people to talk to about it. Now you can log online, surf the lonely highways, and eventually find any number of keyboard chins to wag, which is all well and good on paper, discovering the ridiculous joys of music in its rich and varied guises is what it’s all about, but it has actually led to scenes becoming increasingly marginalised. Youth culture has broken up and moved online, resulting in once-treasured venues closing, longstanding publications going out of print, and musicians’ pockets feeling the pinch.
This fact is doubled down on by the sheer amount of content on there. With over 400 hours of video being uploaded every single minute – and a lot of it being music – it is harder for the great stuff to fairly rise to the top. So, on the one hand, it has happily removed gatekeepers and given everyone a shot, but on the other hand, it is responsible for overcrowding the industry. And perhaps more subtly, it has also diminished the number of new artists putting on live shows and, instead, generating a lot of ‘bedroom pop’. Despite being dubbed ‘the first internet band’, Arctic Monkeys actually rose to unprecedented hype by gigging all over the country and generating an organic buzz by bringing people together for an unforgettable show. Now, the need to upload has perhaps curtailed that.
However, in typical YouTube rabbit hole fashion, this bedroom pop rise has a flipside too. YouTube is not merely a service to share music on, but also to learn about it. Millions of people around the world have learnt how to play guitar, produce a song, deep-dive into sampling and everything in between on YouTube… and all for free. This has created a hub of skilled musicians and allowed for new ideas to germinate quicker than ever before.
Ultimately, the end of its impact on music is listless but it is certain that YouTube has changed the industry forever. And we have Janet Jackson’s nipple to either thank or curse for that.
