I recently asked Nick Cave what it was like to be Nick Cave, and he told me this: "I kind of know that as soon as I enter a room things are going to change for everybody." He wasn't being immodest - just honest. And then the Aussie rocker put his celebrity effect into some sort of perspective. "For some, it's more intense than others," he said. "Take Michael Jackson: When he walks into a room, everything - the entire trajectory of people's lives - changes. Now, I ain't Michael Jackson. But there is an element of that."
Cave may not be Michael Jackson, but the only postwar entertainers who could legitimately claim to equal Jackson's celebrity effect - Sinatra, Presley - are dead. Of pop's living deities, probably only a handful come close, among them Michael's younger sister, Janet.
Imagine, then, what it must be like to be Janet Jackson, the ninth-biggest selling pop act of all time, the second most successful female artist ever and the most searched-for person in Internet history, to see the effect you have on the people, the atmosphere, the temperature, as you enter a room.
"You can feel it," says the woman herself, looking smaller than you'd expect in a black Adidas tracksuit, sitting on a sofa in the office of the Alley Cat studio complex in downtown Los Angeles where she is rehearsing a dance routine for her latest video. "You can sense it. You can see it."
Is it freaky, or a buzz, to have that kind of effect?
"It's not a buzz, and it's not freaky," she considers, her voice veering between a high-pitched murmur and a barely audible whisper. "I've been around it almost all my life. I saw it with my brothers, so it's just ... . It is what it is. But I do see it. I don't really pay that much attention to it, but I see it."
It is she who mentions her brothers, not me: I'm under strict instructions from her PR team not to ask questions about Michael, which is a shame because the T-shirt that she wore during her brother's trial on 10 counts of child molestation in 2005, bearing the words I'm a Pervert Too, was crying out to be discussed. Other subjects that can't be addressed in this interview: Her yo-yoing weight and Nipplegate - the notorious "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, when Justin Timberlake whipped off part of her Mad Maxine black leather ensemble to reveal her right breast with a silver star covering the offending areola ("offend" is the word: more than half a million Americans complained to the TV network).
But I haven't been told that sex per se is off-limits, so I ask Jackson about the title of her 10th and latest record, Discipline, and how it relates to her 1986 breakthrough album, Control. On one of the record's many between-song interludes, she talks about self-control and chastisement, connoting will to power as well as S&M. She seems to have a thing about discipline and control.
"It's actually about aspects of love," she says of her new output. "It is on the sensual side, but I titled the album Discipline because it has different meanings, the most important being discipline in work. To have done it for as long as I have and to have had the success I've had - I mean, obviously, it's God, but it takes discipline and a great deal of focus for that. And I've had that since I was a kid."
Her long career has been all about asserting control - wresting it either from record companies eager to sell her as a pop puppet, or from her domineering father Joe - and sex has been her method of achieving this. On Nasty (from Control), she made explicit her refusal to be portrayed as demure; on If (from 1993's Janet), the phallic imagery left little to the imagination; Would You Mind (from 2001's All for You) should have had a parental advisory sticker with its lyrics about how she was going to kiss you, suck you, taste you, ride you/Feel you deep inside me ooh.
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