Janet Jackson: Staff Picks for Her 60 Best Songs

Since breaking through as a pop star with her Control album 40 years ago, Janet Jackson has amassed one of the great song catalogs in pop or R&B history. Of course, she’s racked up hits like few other artists before or since — including 10 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 , as well as 27 top 10s, all achieved within a 15-year run of staggering chart dominance — with far too many widely beloved classics to even fit all of them into a live setlist. But she’s also released decades of albums whose highlights extend well beyond the singles, with fan favorite deep cuts and remixes that match her stratospheric heights with equally impressive depth.

While Ms. Jackson’s legacy extends to all corners of pop culture — not just iconic music videos, tours and performances, but also into the worlds of television, film, fashion and dance — today, we’re focusing on the songs. To celebrate her upcoming 60th birthday (May 16), we’ve assembled our staff’s picks for Janet’s 60 best songs. Our favorites range from her earliest days of discovering her artistry through collaboration with longtime writer-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, right up through her underrated most recent effort Unbreakable , which showed that even in her fourth decade of music-making, Jackson still hadn’t lost her ability to stay simultaneously contemporary and classic.

See our staff’s choices for her all-time best below — you can also find a listing of her biggest chart hits on the Billboard Hot 100 here — and find more Janet Jackson content on Billboard.com all week, as we continue to celebrate the music and career of one of the most important artists of our lifetime.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/lists/janet-jackson-best-songs/)._