Janet Jackson on Trauma of ‘Duetting’ With Michael Jackson Every Night on Stage: ‘It’s Still Emotional Listening to Him, Seeing Him, Remembering Us’

Even though it’s been 15 years since his death, Janet Jackson still duets with her brother Michael Jackson every night on stage.

Janet, 58 – now older than Michael was when he died in 2009 at 50 – even gets emotional when she performs their collaboration Scream alongside video footage of her big brother on her ongoing Together Again tour, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

In a recent interview, she said: “It’s still emotional listening to him every night, seeing him, remembering us. Mike and I wrote that song in New York, in his apartment.

“So I relive that whole journey and going back to that time and listening to him sing it and remembering when we were working on it and the emotion and what he was going through at that time ... and just me being his little sister, always being by his side, and being that support system. That's always been my role.”

Scream, originally released as the lead single off of Michael’s 1995 album HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, was written in retaliation for the tabloid coverage of the child sexual abuse allegations made against him in 1993.

It included pointed lyrics like: “I’m tired of injustice, I’m tired of the schemes / Your lies are disgusting / So, what does it mean, damn it? / Kickin’ me down, I got to get up / As jacked as it sounds / The whole system sucks, damn it.”

The song peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the charts in other countries like Italy, New Zealand, and Spain, and its iconic black and white music video took home a Grammy Award in 1996.

In her 2022 Lifetime docuseries Janet Jackson, the singer recalled the process of filming the video: “Mike was going through a lot, and I think it was taking its toll on him. It was tough. Michael shot nights; I shot days. His record company, they would block off his whole set so that I couldn’t see what was going on.”

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She added: “They didn’t want me on set. I felt like they were trying to make it very competitive between the two of us. That really hurt me, because I felt I was there fighting the fight with him. Not to battle him. I wanted it to feel like old times between he and I, and it didn’t. Old times had long passed.”

In the wake of Michael’s unexpected death, Janet performed Scream as a tribute at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.