How Justin Timberlake lost the Super Bowl
Do you like me? That’s the latent question throbbing at the centre of every Justin Timberlake song, and suddenly the answer is “no.”
His best pop songs always seemed to radiate desire, but it turns out that his music is merely needy — and Sunday night headlining a hyper-hyped Super Bowl halftime show, Timberlake sounds needier than ever before.
It’s been a trying 72 hours for J.T. Friday, he released “Man of the Woods,” the weakest and most savagely reviewed album of his career. Saturday, rumours zipped across the American bandwidth he’d be performing inside Minneapolis’s U.S. Bank Stadium alongside a hologram of the late Prince — a form of ghoulish duetting that Prince himself once called “demonic.”
So Timberlake is trying to make the world forget his dud album, and that alleged purple hologram and — oh, right — the last time he performed at the Super Bowl, way back in 2004. When he sang, “Bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song,” then proceeded to rip away a significant portion of Janet Jackson’s stage costume, exposing her right breast to 90 million unsuspecting TV viewers.
In the months of pearl-clutching that followed, Timberlake’s career went boffo, while the rest of the industry encouraged Jack- son to convalesce in the void — a stark and enduring example of how our culture allows some artists (white/men) to get away with any old thing, while others (black/women) are swiftly silenced for stepping out of bounds.
So it’s hard to imagine how Timberlake could locate the gall to perform that tune again 14 years later, but — presto! — here comes the neo-disco thumpythump of “Rock Your Body.” Only, when Timberlake finally arrives at the clothes-ripping cue, he pretends to be a bandleader and shouts, “Hold up, stop!” The music halts, the band pivots into “SexyBack,” and Timberlake smiles into the camera, but thankfully doesn’t wink.
Now he’s surrounded by dancers, and backing musicians, and audience members who might actually be dancers paid to look like audience members, and everyone’s clothes look hideously mismatched. And it’s hard to make out the precision of Timberlake’s android-dancing, and it’s even harder to hear his voice, which he only seems to deploy in interstitial bursts as this momentum-sucking medley moves from decade-old hit to decade-old hit.
By the time he lurches into “Cry Me A River,” it’s clear that Timberlake is not going to truly inhabit his music, at least not tonight, or maybe ever again.
Surely, great pop music ex- presses things that can’t be expressed any other way, but for the past decade, Timberlake seems to have preferred expressing himself through voice-acting in Hollywood cartoons and doing halffunny skits with Jimmy Fallon. Suddenly, out on the gridiron, Timberlake’s falsetto sounds like little more than a tool — one that his brightest collaborators, producers Timbaland and the Neptunes, once used to send their beautiful sci-fi pop songs across the planet.
The grody metaphysics finally surface nine minutes into the show, when Prince’s voice is piped into the stadium and his image is projected onto a towering, billowing scrim. Timberlake has decided to drape an isolated vocal track of “I Would Die 4 U” over the oozing chords of his 2006 ballad “Until the End of Time,” and it feels more like taking than giving. Prince didn’t die for Justin Timberlake, and he certainly didn’t die for this.
We begin to unclench our teeth by the time he reaches “Can’t Stop the Feeling” — not because it’s the most confused feel-good anthem of this feel-scared era, but because the show is almost over. And then it is. And a feeling of togetherness washes over us, a feeling of certainty that we all just witnessed something unambiguously underwhelming.