How the Superbowl’s Nipplegate saga affected Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson’s careers
AS Justin Timberlake returns to the Super Bowl stage 14 years after Nipplegate, Janet Jackson is still struggling to recover from the damage done to her career from the ‘wardrobe malfunction’.
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IT lasted just nine-sixteenths of a second.
Yet the infamous flash of a nipple during Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s halftime performance at the 2004 Super Bowl, would make a lasting impression on the world.
As Timberlake prepares to return to the Super Bowl stage on Monday, Nipplegate continues to resonate 14 years later for its profound impact on television broadcasting, the internet, the dictionary, the TimesUp movement and Jackson’s career.
Aired to an American television audience of more than 100 million, the storm in a D cup entrenched “wardrobe malfunction” in the vernacular, courtesy of Timberlake’s post-scandal apology statement.
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It ushered in a five-second delay on live television performances to prevent airing indecent, obscene or profane content after the Federal Communications Commission was deluged with viewer complaints about the Jackson nip slip.
That split of a second moment would also partly inspire the arrival of YouTube two years later.
Co-founder Jawed Karim had missed the halftime show and became frustrated he couldn’t find video of it. He and his friends Steve Chen and Chad Hurley created YouTube as a platform where people could upload and share their own content.
But for all those pros, there was one big con.
Jackson’s career bore the brunt of the fallout from the exposure of her right breast and the sunburst nipple shield when Timberlake ripped off the breastplate of her latex corset.
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Furious about being in the eye of the FCC storm, the halftime show’s broadcasters and subsidiaries including MTV, CBS and Clear Channel stations banned her songs and videos.
Jackson was also banned from performing at the Grammys the following week because she wouldn’t apologise again, having already issued a filmed mea culpa demanded by the Super Bowl broadcasters.
Timberlake did go to the Grammys, accepted two awards and used one of his acceptance speeches to reiterate just how sorry he was about the whole mess.
With the Cry Me A River singer now invited back to the Super Bowl party, the events of 2004 are being closely re-examined and Jackson fans who accuse him of throwing her under a bus back then are demanding #JusticeForJanet, a hashtag which started trending when Timberlake was announced as this year’s halftime attraction last year.
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But how did the whole mess actually happen?
It remains a mystery as to whether Nipplegate was an accidental wardrobe malfunction or deliberate publicity stunt.
The artists insist it was unplanned; the broadcasters claimed it was all Jackson’s fault, despite the fact it was Timberlake who yanked the material as he sang the lyric “bet I have you naked by the end of this song” as they performed his hit Rock Your Body.
The truth is during rehearsals MTV producers had been entertaining themselves by pretending to rip their own clothes off to that line.
And the artists themselves had tried out a move where Timberlake ripped off Jackson’s kilt but producers killed it because it didn’t look good.
The apology demanded of Jackson by the NFL and the broadcasters combined with their own statements pointed the finger squarely at her. She had changed the performance at the last minute.
It was all her fault.
“The tearing of Janet Jackson’s costume was unrehearsed, unplanned, completely unintentional and was inconsistent with assurances we had about the content of the performance,” the MTV statement read.
Jackson seemed to back them with her own apology and that Timberlake was supposed to remove the rubber breastplate to reveal a lacy red brassiere but all the material came away in his hand.
“My decision to change the Super Bowl performance was made after the final rehearsal. MTV, CBS, [and] the NFL had no knowledge of this whatsoever and unfortunately, the whole thing went wrong in the end. I am really sorry if I offended anyone, that was truly not my intention”.
Yet why was Jackson wearing the sunburst nipple shield if she didn’t intend for it to be seen? Houston body piercer Byriah Dailey told USA Today this week the jewellery was purchased by Jackson’s stylist in the week leading up to the Super Bowl and told him ‘OK, watch the halftime show. There’s going to be a surprise at the end.’”
If it was a publicity stunt ahead of the release of her Damita Jo album the following month, it backfired spectacularly.
That widely acclaimed record sold three million copies, her lowest sales since 1984 and her subsequent records 20 Y.O. and Discipline moved one million copies each. Some critics believed the albums failed to perform better because of the airplay ban on her music.
It has taken Jackson more than a decade to resurrect her career with her latest album Unbreakable and her triumphant return to the concert stage last year with the State of the World tour.
Timberlake, who had left the boy band NSYNC two years before the Super Bowl incident, has since enjoyed a successful trajectory in both his music and acting careers.
His new album Man In The Woods debuted at No. 1 worldwide on iTunes when it was released on Friday.
While her fans insist he still owes her an apology — and maybe a guest spot at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show — to be fair he did acknowledge that Jackson had unfairly weathered most of the Nipplegate fallout when he was promoting his second solo record FutureSex/LoveSounds album in 2006.
“In my honest opinion now ... I could’ve handled it better. ... I’m part of a community that consider themselves artists. And if there was something I could have done in her defence that was more than I realised then, I would have,” he said.
“But the other half of me was like, ‘Wow. We still haven’t found the weapons of mass destruction and everybody cares about this!’
“I probably got 10 per cent of the blame, and that says something about society ... I think that America’s harsher on women. And I think that America is, you know, unfairly harsh on ethnic people.”
Those comments ring true more than a decade later as he prepares as Super Bowl show, a week after TimesUp took centre stage at the Grammys.
The awards celebrated the movement with Janelle Monae’s stirring speech about breaking the silence around sexual harassment and gender inequality in the music industry, P!nk’s impassioned Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken and Kesha’s emotional performance of her song Praying, which was greeted with tears and a standing ovation.
But the lack of female winners, which provoked the #GrammysSoMale hashtag, and Album of the Year nominee Lorde being shut-out of a solo performance despite her male peers getting their moment on the stage, left an ugly taste compounded by Grammys head Neil Portnow tone deaf response to the controversies.
Portnow copped an outrage tsunami when he said women needed to “step up” to right the balance at the Grammys.
Jackson is keeping quiet on the Nipplegate fray ahead of Timberlake’s Super Bowl performance, as she insists the pair have made peace in the intervening years.
But the music industry’s problems with harassment, inequality and diversity remain as glaring and unresolved as they were in 2004.
Originally published as How the Superbowl’s Nipplegate saga affected Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson’s careers