The song that inspired him: “What’s Going On” (Renaldo Benson, Alfred Cleveland, Marvin Gaye), 1971

“That takes you to another place,” Jam said. “That changed the whole world, like, put you in a different place, and that’s one of those songs. What I really love about it, first of all, the fact that it’s lyrically so relevant is very bittersweet, because it shouldn’t be. Those lyrics that he’s saying should not be happening now, but what I liked about it was it’s almost a lullaby, the way he sings it. You can just listen and let the music happen, but then you can dig into the lyrics, and the lyrics are very provocative.

“The other thing I like about it was he wasn’t trying to solve the problems, because it wasn’t — you couldn’t really have a solve the problems moment. But the fact that he’s asking a question, and the first two songs actually on that album are ‘What’s Going On,’ where he’s asking what’s going on, and then the next song after that is ‘What’s Happening Brother.’ So he’s kind of asking the questions and letting the discussion happen, and then he’s observing other things like ‘Inner City Blues [Make Me Wanna Holler],’ and so on and so forth. But yeah, ‘What’s Going On’ to me is just — it’s so good that I can’t even be jealous of it, because that’s not even anywhere in my… I can’t even be jealous.

“It was the changing of Motown… that changed the whole idea. Berry Gordy didn’t want [Marvin] to do that album, because, you know, he was a love song guy. He actually produced a couple of songs for a group called The Originals that actually were big hit songs, and that kind of proved that, ‘Yes, I can produce my own stuff, so let me make my record.’ And I know it’s Smokey Robinson’s favorite album ever. So yeah, that’s a good one.”

The song he wrote: “Rhythm Nation” (written with Terry Lewis and Janet Jackson), 1989

Emmons opened the discussion by saying, “All right, so Jimmy Jam, one of the things you had talked about when you picked ‘What’s Going On,’ that you had said that Rhythm Nation wouldn’t exist without What’s Going On. So we have “Rhythm Nation” queued up here, which just got inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.”

“Yeah, so first of all, thank you, Sly and the Family Stone,” Jam began. “Because the way that song came about was, we had the concept for ‘Rhythm Nation,’ but we didn’t have a track for it. We knew that it was, you know, kind of the theme we wanted, and I was out at dinner, and you know, when the restaurants play music, and it’s just kind of background music, like you’re not really hearing it. And I heard, ‘Thank You [Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin],’ come on, Sly & the Family Stone. So I heard it come on, and I kind of, for a minute, I thought, ‘Oh, I love this song,’ and then I went back to the conversation, and then, for some reason, when it got to the kind of, I don’t even know what you called it, like the instrumental breakdown, it’s the kind of guitar where it goes, ‘Jing, ding, ding, ding, ding,’ I said, ‘Oh my god, check please.’

“I went back to the studio, and I basically took that one little piece of the guitar part from ‘Thank You,’ I looped it, I put some drums on it — and I remember Janet walking in the room, and she just said, ‘Is that “Rhythm Nation”?’ And I said, ‘I think so.’ And then we wrote it from there. But thank you, Sly & the Family Stone.”

Emmons also asked about Jam & Lewis starting work on the Rhythm Nation album, three years after their blockbuster success with Jackson’s previous album, Control.

“So there was a three-year period between records, and she walked in very confident,” Jam said. “She knew what she wanted to talk about, and that was different from Control [where] she was still kind of finding her way. But Rhythm Nation, she walked in and just was excited about working. The other thing I remember was it had snowed. We were working in Minneapolis — and the first thing she did, she got so excited when she saw the snow, she lays down and starts making a snow angel. And we’re like, ‘No, you’re gonna catch a cold.’ And of course, she did. But some of the vocals that she did, she had a cold, but it gave it a kind of a cool little rasp to it. The memories of making that album were really great, and everybody left us alone because we were up in Minneapolis, so nobody could just drop by the studio.

“And, A&M, I will say, did a wonderful job of letting us sequence the record the way we wanted to, to put those songs up first. There was a suggestion — not so much from the label — but there was a suggestion that we should call the album Escapade, put a nice color picture of Janet on the front of it, and basically take ‘Rhythm Nation,’ ‘State of the World,’ ‘The Knowledge,’ those types of songs, and put them at the end of the album. And we were like, ‘No, no, we’re going to start the album with these…’ like, ‘We have a whole concept.’ So I will say they were very creative, they let us kind of do it … And, A&M believed in us, and the fact that they believed in us, and they really backed us on it. And then the fact that it was so successful — that was to me what made it feel really great.”

Jam also saluted John McClain, the A&M executive who had an executive producer credit on the album, who died on Tuesday (May 26). “He [had] faxed us the roster, he said, ‘Who do you want to work with on the roster? We looked at it, and our fingers both stopped on Janet’s name, because not only did we feel like we wanted to hear her voice on something we wrote, but we also felt like we knew not so much what was missing, but what she hadn’t had on the two albums before. Which was basically that attitude, that feisty attitude that she had when she was an actress. So that was the thing. But for us it’s really the inspiration if someone inspires us. So I think that’s the thing that we always kind of look for. Who inspires us?”

Jam hedged a bit on his choice of favorite song he’d written. At another point in the conversation, he pointed to another Jam and Lewis song, ‘Optimistic,’ which they co-wrote with Gary Hines.

“I know that whenever someone asks our favorite song, and favorite is always really tough, but I always say that if there was a song that was put in a time capsule in 100 years from now, but aliens or somebody came down and opened it up and it said Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis on it, the song they would play would be ‘Optimistic’ by Sounds of Blackness. And the reason we say that is because that song explains everything that we are… our rhythmic sense, our lyric sense, so on and so forth. That was the song that people said got them up in the morning, or when they were having a bad day, that was the song they put on — and it’s one of those songs that you know, some 30 plus years later, it’s still that having that same effect on people. And we always call music the divine art, and I think that’s a good representation of it, as far as we’re concerned.”