It would have been quite strange if Justin Timberlake, of all people, opened his new album with a sad story about the high price of fame. But one in which she frames the pain he's endured as a byproduct of his devotion to his Tennessee hometown? That's really crazy.
Yet that's just what Timberlake does with “Memphis,” the first song on “Everything I Thought It Was,” which came out Friday, more than half a decade after the release of his previous LP. Over a blurry, slow-motion trap beat, the singer and former boy band star, now 43, laments the isolation he experienced and the sacrifices he made on his way to the top, a wild choice given the criticism he's received. have been generated in recent years towards Timberlake. as a man who was long allowed to slide through issues that hurt the women around him (including his ex-girlfriend Britney Spears and his former Super Bowl halftime partner Janet Jackson).
It's also a disconcerting aesthetic approach: rooting his struggles in his connection to an African-American cultural capital: “I was too far away in the world, but I still stand up for my city,” he insists in his well-practiced blacent. – Timberlake flaunts his proximity to Blackness at a time when pop seems to have little use as it once did for white people making R&B. Consider the disappearance of Robin Thicke; Consider Justin Bieber's apparent reluctance to get back into the game.
Or consider that much of the discourse surrounding Usher's Super Bowl halftime performance this year had to do with the unfortunate fact that it took this black superstar so long to reach pop's biggest stage, while which Timberlake was invited to headline six years ago. – and after having participated in the 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” that derailed Jackson's career.
None of this is meant to doubt Timberlake's genuine love for R&B or diminish his undeniable ability to do so: though packed with simplistic disco-funk tracks and moody One Republic-style pop-rock melodies, “Everything I Thought It Was” contains a handful of gems in “Love & War”, a prince-style ballad with its most beautiful falsetto singing, and the slow and spacey “What Lovers Do”; “Selfish,” the album’s coldly received lead single, is another highlight, this one with echoes of Bieber’s underrated “Changes” from 2020.
Timberlake's enthusiasm was also on display last week at the Wiltern, where he hosted a free, intimate concert aimed at drawing attention to the new music and world tour he's launching next month. His 2006 ballad, “Until the End of Time,” was soulful and slow-paced (watch him do it with similar finesse in a newly released NPR Tiny Desk Concert) and he seemed sincerely excited to bring out up-and-coming R&B singer Coco Jones. singer, for a duet on his sneaky “ICU,” which he called one of her favorite songs of the past five years.
Jones wasn't Timberlake's only guest at the Wiltern: Near the end of the show, he brought the members of 'N Sync together to perform a medley of several of the band's older hits, including “Gone,” probably their most downtempo moment. awesome. and “Girlfriend,” which the group did as a raunchy mashup of Too Short's classic “Blow the Whistle.” (Less happily, the members also sat on five carefully arranged stools to deliver the live debut of “Paradise,” a sentimental new 'N Sync song featured on “Everything I Thought It Was.”)
For most of the nearly two decades since 'N Sync's initial breakup, Timberlake has been ambivalent about a comeback, even avoiding a highly publicized cameo from the group during Ariana Grande's Coachella performance in 2019. Here, Yet he seemed content to have his old friends at his side and eager, perhaps, to revisit a time when their privilege promised unlimited mileage.
