Janis Ian came to national attention in 1967 when she performed “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking)” on the CBS television special Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, hosted by Leonard Bernstein. She was all of 16 at the time, but the song was already on its third release, Ian having written and recorded it when she was 14. The subject matter, an interracial relationship not approved of by the girl’s mother, was simply too much for some people (she received death threats and had concerts disrupted by crowds shouting racial slurs), but also found a receptive audience. The single went to #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and boosted a career that began when Ian published her first song at age 12 (“Hair of Spun Gold” in Broadside) and began performing in clubs.
Ian was a true prodigy in a world that is not always kind to prodigies, and the twists and turns of her life and career embody the sentiment expressed in the poem “The Spring Offensive of the Snail” by Marge Piercy: “nothing living resembles a straight line.” Ian’s life and work are documented in Varda Bar-Kar’s Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, a traditional documentary whose materials include archival footage, new interviews and performances by Ian, and re-enactments and animations.
Born Janis Eddy Fink in 1951, Ian grew up on a chicken farm in New Jersey and in New York City (she took her brother’s middle name as her surname for professional purposes) in a musical family with strong Jewish roots (her grandparents emigrated from Poland, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan). Ian’s determination and precocity are encapsulated in an anecdote she tells in this film: when she was about 2 ½, she demanded that her father (a music teacher whose politics made it difficult for him to keep a job) teach her to play the piano. He said that she would first need to learn the alphabet and know how to tell time, so she went straight to her mother and said “I need to tell time and know the alphabet, and I need it as quickly as possible.” The next day she announced to her father that she had accomplished those tasks, and he began teaching her. Other telling anecdotes illustrating her lack of fear and determination to be true to herself: the time she lit producer Shadow Morton’s newspaper on fire because he was reading it during her audition, and her refusal to change a line (referring to the boyfriend’s skin color) in “Society’s Child” even though Morton said that, if she changed it, he could make the song a #1 hit.
Ian pursued an active performing and recording career, but her next big hit didn’t come until 1975, with the release of her single “At Seventeen” (on her seventh album), which went to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy for Best Vocal Performance – Female. She was also the second musical guest on the series premiere of Saturday Night Live, and the album containing “At Seventeen” song was certified platinum. There were many more twists and turns to come, including being broke several times, being blacklisted by television after an unfounded accusation by Bill Cosby, and enduring a bad marriage before finding the right life partner.
To the casual fan such as myself, “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen” are pretty much all I knew about her career, so I’m grateful to Janis Ian: Breaking Silence for filling in a lot of the details. There’s a lot to enjoy in this documentary, although it’s also overly long at 114 minutes, and includes way too many re-enactments (the end credits state that “This film depicts events from Janis Ian’s life as imagined by the director for a richer audience experience”). | Sarah Boslaugh
Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is distributed on DVD by Kino Lorber. The only extras on the disc are the trailers for this and four other films.
