Dancing On the Charts

By JAY COCKS

Welcome back, Madonna. A lot's been happening since you've been away. You just hit American concert halls for the first time in three years, and you're dancing back into a changed pop world. Better sneak a look. A few women out there may be gaining on you.

There's Janet Jackson, 24, Michael's younger sister, enjoying her fourth Top Five hit with her current single, Alright, and an album, Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814, that has already sold five million copies. Her current tour, her first sustained appearance as a solo act, leaves no doubt that she's not a studio-made creature. Her show combines sleek high tech and smooth dance rhythm into an evening of snazzy soul with a social conscience.

There's also Paula Abdul, 27, the former Los Angeles Lakers cheerleader who became a choreographer, then singer and finally a superstar. Abdul's celebrity ascent has been so persistent (her album Forever Your Girl was in the Top Ten for 64 weeks and spawned five hit singles) and so dizzying that it hasn't left her time to make a follow-up record. Her newly released Shut Up and Dance is an album of Forever remixes slicked up at the sound board. The idea is to tide fans over until she finishes choreographing Oliver Stone's film biography of Jim Morrison. She had better hurry.

Because there's Jody Watley, 30, godchild of soul great Jackie Wilson. With six Top Ten singles from her first two records, she is hard at work not only on a new album (due out by year's end) but also on keeping the lines drawn and the competitive edge keen. "Janet and Paula are more similar to each other than I am," she says. "They both are much more accomplished dancers than I am. They are more commercially successful than I am. I'm innovative, sort of the renegade of the bunch. I have shorter hair. I have a tattoo."

And then there's the sprightly Gloria Estefan, 32, who boogies with a Latin lilt and a dash of salsa, temporarily out of commission with a bad back after a nasty bus crash. (She's on the mend at home in Miami, thanks, doing fine and due back on stage in three to six months.) "I don't feel Cuban or American," the Cuban-born singer reflected before her accident. "I guess I feel Latin Miami." That neatly encapsulates the music she makes too: sunny, open and hot.

And let's not forget Taylor Dayne, who looks like Kim Basinger and has all the funk of Batman's butler Alfred. Not to mention -- well, perhaps just mention -- Jane Child, Lisa Stansfield and Alannah Myles, and even Basia, who brings an East European flavor to all this booty shaking.

This group of women owes a stepsisterly debt to Madonna. They are singers who have molded a slick look, cool moves and a crafty urban sound into a commanding cultural presence. One crucial difference is that Madonna now dwells in the realms of rarefied pop; she is a totem of high fashion. Jackson, Abdul, Watley and Estefan have a more vigorous immediacy. They seem, whatever their success, cozier with the kids, closer to the street corner.

The proximity is crucial. Moves are as vital as music right now. Not since the days of Travolta's white suit have the dance floors and the chart tops been so closely aligned. Madonna's inescapable new single, Vogue (currently No. 1), evokes the trend for "voguing," a dance that may yet become a phenomenon now that the Material Girl has given it her blessing. Jackson, Abdul and the others have different, rather more soulful moves, but the interdependence between musical stuff and strutting stuff has given them all a generic name: "dance divas."

"I hate being called a dance diva!" protests Watley. "My intent has always been to make great music." Says Jackson: "Aside from dance music, I don't think there's anything whatsoever that Madonna and I have in common. She doesn't really dance." Jackson, of course, can really shake it down, having learned her moves from Abdul (who collaborated on four circuit-blowing videos from Janet's smash 1986 Control album).

Dance music is sex in syncopation. Despite Abdul's occasional attempts at raunch, like the video for Cold-Hearted, she seems the Valley Girl incarnate, a Doris Day for the '90s whose response to a heavy sexual move would be a rousing Lakers cheer. Jackson plays against carnality with genuine winsomeness ("I think there's a sassyness, but I just don't think I'm sexy"), and with a deliberate but unemphatic social agenda touching on everything from youthful rootlessness to pervasive bigotry. "I love Tracy Chapman and U2, but it's not me," Jackson says. "No one likes to sit and listen to someone preach for hours and hours. Kids who listen to my music hop from party to party, just having a good time. They pull out the lyric sheet because they're so much into the music, and they come up to me and say, 'Man, I didn't know that song was so serious.' That makes me feel really good."

The strength of Abdul's songs is their undiluted danceability. She does not write her own material, which at least means she can dodge the full blame for such refrains as "And you know -- it ain't fiction/ Just a natural fact/ We come together/ Cuz opposites attract." Says Danny Kelly, an editor at England's New Musical Express, where these lyrics provoke "gales of laughter" among the staff: "Paula Abdul is this year's popular bimbette. She's beyond redemption." Abdul insists, "I can be whatever I want to be." She vows, however, to take a stronger hand in writing her new album, and even suggests she might dip into a political theme.

Jackson is a deft writer; she collaborated on six of Rhythm Nation's tunes with her savvy producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and is especially proud of Black Cat. She should be. She wrote that one all on her own and, along with its restless beat, provided a cool lyrical ferocity ("Black cat nine lives/ Short days long nights/ Livin' on the edge/ Not afraid to die") that recalls the scarier walks that brother Michael has taken on the wild side.

Jackson started to make Control when she was not yet out of her teens, working with producers Jam and Lewis. On Rhythm Nation, she sent a fretful record-company executive home, dumped his concept for the album and substituted her own notion of a "rhythm nation," a kind of border-to-border and sea-to-sea evocation of a single harmonious subgroup united by the big beat. "That's what's so nice about a rhythm nation. It really does exist."

Jackson says that, and smiles, and you believe it. At the very least, it makes you want to apply for a visa.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles