It’s Janet — Miss Birthday if You’re Nasty

One of the top-selling and highest-charting musical artists of all time, Janet Jackson celebrates her sixtieth birthday on May 16 – and if you can remember her as Penny from Good Times, you may suddenly be feeling a strong urge to refill your pill organizer.

Alongside her career as a beloved and influential musician, performer, and choreographer, Jackson has had a pretty tumultuous ride. Take the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, a performance in which Justin Timberlake removed a portion of Jackson’s outfit, thereby confronting a live global audience with the alarming fact that people have bodies. Jackson’s career suffered multiple setbacks as a result of that scandal, but Timberlake somehow went unpunished. Which is kind of like investigating a carjacking, letting the thief go free, and prosecuting the Camaro.

And maybe you’ve heard a thing or two about her family. They’ve attracted attention for some stuff.

But none of that can take away from a career’s worth of astonishing creative and commercial success and her groundbreaking influence as an artist who cleared a path for the visions of women musicians from Britney to Beyoncé. And that was all before she even turned sixty, by which point most of us haven’t even gotten around to our goal of cleaning out the garage.