Opinion | Janet Jackson Gets Some Overdue Shine

America, and the music world at large, has spent a significant portion of the past month grappling with the implications of “Leaving Neverland,” the haunting HBO documentary that revisits highly credible pedophilia allegations against Michael Jackson. But on Friday, good news will emerge about a member of the Jackson family that runs the risk of being overlooked.

Mr. Jackson’s younger sister, Janet Jackson, who has been one of the world’s brightest and most influential pop stars in her own right, will finally be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — 15 years after the “Nipplegate” fiasco at the Super Bowl halftime show that threatened her career, and 30 years after the release of her groundbreaking album “Rhythm Nation 1814.”

Unlike most of her contemporaries in a comparable stratum, Ms. Jackson has found her entry into music’s most recognizable house of prestige elusive until now. She has been eligible since 2007, and there has been no shortage of whispers or indignant blogging, insisting she has been left out of the hall’s induction classes until now by the same entertainment industry forces that marginalized her after the infamous “wardrobe malfunction.”

In February 2004 — when phones weren’t smart, Twitter didn’t exist, The Facebook was days away from birth, LeBron James was still a teenager and Donald Trump was still a Democrat with a reality show — Janet Jackson had a nightmare unfold, in the space of a second, as she headlined the MTV-produced halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII. Before a crowd of over 71,000 and 90 million more watching on TV, Ms. Jackson performed a medley of her hits across three decades. She was then joined for a finale by a bearded yet still baby-faced Justin Timberlake to perform “Rock Your Body,” a catchy, dance-inducing number from his solo debut.

The song, which threw the crowd into a happy frenzy, briefly became a duet. Then, in a cinematic shock — as the duo spun apart for what was meant as a final “costume reveal” in the choreography — Mr. Timberlake ripped off a portion of Ms. Jackson’s top, exposing her right breast on live television, just after he’d delivered the song’s last line: “Bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song.”

By the time heads quit spinning, “wardrobe malfunction” had been coined, and what was meant to be a crowning moment for Ms. Jackson was reduced to a meme. They both said it was an accident. But conspiracy theories abounded, and still do.

Parent groups, major advertisers (their parent companies) and the White House all condemned the incident. CBS was handed a fine by the Federal Communications Commission for indecency, which was ultimately voided. And Mr. Timberlake — who, accidentally or not, did the ripping — largely avoided public rebuke.

Ms. Jackson, absent from the Grammys that year under unclear circumstances, after being scheduled to appear, experienced a newfangled, online-enabled public taunting analogous only to that faced by Monica Lewinsky at the millennium’s turn. She lost countless endorsement and touring opportunities. (She’ll have her highest-profile return to the limelight when she begins a residency in Las Vegas in May.)

But, of course, the five-time Grammy Award winner is being honored because her cultural influence and career, while dotted with distress, has been anything but tragic, taken as a whole.

The youngest child in the Jackson family, she had seen her brothers already gain fame as the Jackson 5 before she was a teenager. The 1986 album “Control,” produced by the icons Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, would be her own, noncoincidentally titled breakthrough. She had fired her infamously domineering father as her manager, and her quest for independence powered the project’s vocal energy, which was matched by bombastic synths and carefree drum-heavy beats.

“Nasty,” a defiant, feminine power anthem protesting unwanted male attention and disrespect, featured a video subtly ahead of its time in its messaging about consent. (The snare-heavy beat drops, pointedly, after she shouts at a grabby pursuer, “Stop!”)

“Control” topped the charts and established Ms. Jackson as a pioneer of genre-bending New Jack Swing and the modern music video: self-referential quirks and extended dance breakdowns paired with film-like production and narrative. The visual companions to lasting singles like the exasperated yet ebullient “What Have You Done for Me Lately” and the dance number “Pleasure Principle” (legendary back flip and all) helped break MTV’s gendered color line.

Where “Control” focused on self-actualization, “Rhythm Nation 1814” (1989) aimed to address the world and her country, with its simmering social divides, and offer a salve.

“Join forces in protest to social injustice/A generation full of courage, come forth with me,” she declared over the up-tempo, industrial grind of the title track. The progressivism embedded in the album managed to be simultaneously cool and civic-minded at a time when such a feat was considered nearly impossible for a pop star.

Not only did all seven singles from “Rhythm Nation 1814” land in the top five of the Billboard 100, it had No. 1 hits in three years — with different songs topping the chart from 1989 through 1991. A long-form video medley of the album, shot in black and white, won a Grammy. Ms. Jackson’s global popularity and the indescribable coolness of her perch in American popular culture at the time is hard to capture in hindsight, or to compare with our digitally Balkanized era.

She continued to flourish with her fifth album, 1993’s “Janet.,” embracing her femininity and sexuality with more confident ease than in any of her previous work. Writing about the album on its 25th anniversary for Rolling Stone, Brittany Spanos noted how “Janet.” inspired artists like Beyoncé, Rihanna, SZA and Janelle Monáe, all of whom openly testify to how her example helped them incorporate “power, intimacy and assertiveness” into their own work.

For many women of color growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, Ms. Jackson was the first “triple threat” superstar who looked like them to reach, or fully “cross over,” to the mainstream. It was “Janet” whom they danced to in front of their mirrors and imitated in dress, not Michael.

As she entered her 30s and her career steadied to a cruise of experiments and radio hits, Michael Jackson’s had become increasingly weighed down by his questionable relations with children.

Mr. Jackson was first accused of molestation in 1993. The case was settled for over $20 million in 1994 and the charges were ultimately dropped after the boy refused to cooperate with the investigation. Janet Jackson was resolute in support of her brother during the episode and after it.

Footage from a documentary released in 2016 shows her denouncing the 1993 allegations. “Now, if this really went on, do you think a father would accept money?” she asks the interviewer. “Do you think that would make everything O.K.? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Ms. Jackson hasn’t spoken up since “Leaving Neverland” aired. Her nephew Taj Jackson told CBS News’s Gayle King that she feared addressing the film would just “put more energy” into the matter, but he insisted that she, too, believed Michael was innocent.

However, her radio silence now, after a previous vociferous defense, seems at best a convenient tactic of avoidance by the family’s second-most-famous member and at worst a tacit acknowledgment that she was most likely wrong all along.

Still, whereas Mr. Jackson’s career never quite recovered from a scandal of his own making, Janet Jackson’s career was derailed by a bizarre moment over which she had little agency. (In an extra, queasy layer of coincidence, “Rock Your Body,” the song playing during the Super Bowl nudity flash, is a tune that Mr. Jackson had reportedly turned down for his 2001 album, according to Billboard’s Jason Lipshutz.)

The public rebuke she received wasn’t all organic. A 2018 HuffPost report revealed that the CBS chairman Les Moonves, who was ousted last year as evidence of his own sexual misconduct mounted, was determined to ruin Ms. Jackson’s career because of the Super Bowl incident. Convinced it was a stunt and enraged with Ms. Jackson, according to the report, he demanded that Viacom radio stations, as well as VH1 and MTV, which she helped integrate in prior decades, stop playing her music.

Ms. Jackson and Mr. Timberlake both offered apologies. But Ms. Jackson, a black woman, was almost exclusively shamed. For uncertain reasons, despite initial plans, she wasn’t at the Grammys. He was still welcome to attend and won two awards. His career flourished, even as it waxed and waned (see his return to the halftime show of the Super Bowl last year). Hers was arguably suffocated — and at a time before millions of fans could crowdsource their cultural capital for backlash. There was no Black Twitter — with its mix of influential literati, activists and humorists — to have Janet Jackson’s back.

The moment lasted just nine-sixteenths of a second but carried centuries of subtext, something Mr. Timberlake himself pointed out after time passed. “I probably got 10 percent of the blame,” he admitted. “I think America’s probably harsher on women, and I think America is, you know, unfairly harsh on ethnic people.”

“Nipplegate” is, in some ways, textbook proof that “intersectionality” — the term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the same year “Rhythm Nation” was released, to describe the overlapping forms of discrimination — is not an abstract “ism” but a reality that can negatively manifest itself in culture-altering ways.

When Madonna kissed Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, there were guffaws and temporary scoldings. But she was once again celebrated as a provocateur, then shortly afterward inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 — by Mr. Timberlake, no less. Ms. Jackson, who became eligible for the hall in 2007 didn’t receive a nomination until 2016.

Although Janet Jackson’s legacy certainly doesn’t need the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s validation, its lack of recognition was threatening to become a glaring omission. Now, at long last, the oversight will be corrected — and Ms. Jackson can take her bow.

Julian Kimble is a culture reporter who has written for The Washington Post, GQ, The Fader and Pitchfork.

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