Justin Timberlake is never afraid to poke a little fun at himself,
He’s no Bowie, but he does show range
We can only hope Justin Timberlake’s marketing team was suitably chagrined by the announcement, just two days before their own big release, of a new album by David Bowie.
Here was Bowie, with nary a peep beforehand, and nothing but a birthday tie-in, drawing the kind of wild attention the Timberlake team needed a slickly produced announcement video, a countdown clock and the promise of a cameo from Jay-Z to come close to matching.
It was a pretty stark contrast — the in-the-cultural-fabric stardom of an icon like Bowie against the still very much stage-managed mythmaking of Timberlake, the king of pop’s avant-garde against a man who has made his musical career playing around in the wake of cultural trends.
For all the stark contrasts of the singers, though, there is a kind of weird symmetry in the public personas of the pop stars.
If Bowie is the ultimate reinventor, building up and discarding esoteric personas as though they were playroom Lego sets, Timberlake has so far proved himself to be an incredible reinterpreter, almost unprecedentedly willing to play around in the tightly constrained spotlight of a mainstream American idol.
They live in absurdly different worlds, but there’s a shared restlessness to how they interact with them.
Keep in mind, Timberlake is someone who has very nearly been genetically bred to provide inoffensive entertainment for the masses.
His first appearance in the public eye was on Star Search at 11 years old (singing, of all things, a country song).
A few years later, he was one of an infamous crop of Mousketeers, sharing time in Mickey’s clubhouse with J.C. Chasez, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling and Britney Spears. Chasez would join Timberlake as a co-lead singer in ’N Sync, which for all intents and purposes slowly morphed from the backup Backstreet Boys to a star vehicle for Timberlake, however much the strictures of boy band balance demanded they all played their roles in the gestalt.
So far, so ’90s heartthrob. But once he sprang off that launch pad, Timberlake started to get interesting, or at least as interesting as a resolutely middle-of-the-road star can get these days. His solo debut, Justified — with just a touch more ego, he could have tried to make Timberlaked an adjective — didn’t stray too far from ’N Sync’s glossy R&B, but it did put him into the semi-rarefied air of Robbie Williams, Bobby Brown and Michael Jackson as a boy band survivor.
And the blandness started to get sanded down some: Justified’s biggest hit was a public breakup song to fellow all-American Britney Spears, Cry Me a River, and Timberlake helped make “wardrobe malfunction” a late-night monologue punchline when he accidentally on purpose revealed Janet Jackson’s left breast to the 2004 Super Bowl audience.
Those pale-grey hints of darkness helped Timberlake own the jumpedup libido of Future Sex/Love Sounds, a significant leap forward musically, the most Prince-like album a former Tiger Beat pin-up could ever hope to make. And though SexyBack is likely to define Timberlake as singer, what he did in the aftermath of it is more or less unprecedented among his contemporaries.
It’s hard to stay sexy and mysterious when you’ve been mocking that stance on and off for six years.
Timberlake’s acting career, while an obvious step in the era of celebrities as brands, has been marked by an impressive diversity.
Showily “gritty” turns in stuff like Alpha Dog gave way to a gonzo turn in Richard Kelly’s absurdist fantasia, Southland Tales; an unnecessarily committed comedic turn in The Love Guru is balanced against scene-stealing supporting work as Napster founder Sean Parker in one of the past decade’s defining films, The Social Network.
And if his recent penchant for pander-y rom-coms grates, he’s got a role in the next Coen Brothers film and a turn as a functioning alcoholic, in a comedy, coming up. (Or at least let the phrase “Justin Timberlake as Boo Boo” overstimulate your brain’s absurdity centre for a while.)
Now, try to imagine any other pop star of the past 20 years even trying that stuff, much less pulling it off.
Comedy, of course, has been Timberlake’s great success in the time between albums.
His cameo as a cluelessly horny R&B star in D--k in a Box more or less launched The Lonely Island beyond Saturday Night Live, to the point where his recent five-timer turn hosting the show — let’s see if Adam Levine makes it — was almost as talked-about as The 20/20 Experience launch.
Timberlake’s willingness to make himself a bit ridiculous is probably what sets him furthest apart from his peers, most of whom have images pretty tightly tied up in monumental self-seriousness.
He doesn’t really go so far as to make himself the butt of a joke, but he at least has a refreshingly silly side, the cheery clowning of a man who lives a charmed life. He’s not exactly Andy Kaufman, but who else among the stadium-fillers and topbillers could keep up with Jimmy Fallon for a history-of-rap skit, much less for a whole week?
If anything, comedy might be the thing that finally pigeonholes him. Stretches of The 20/20 Experience — which, it should be said, is another sideways musical step for Timberlake, this time into being something like hip-hop’s Michael Bublé — sound like wayward sketches, and even the straight-faced announcement of the album couldn’t escape the whiff of parody.
It’s hard to stay sexy and mysterious when you’ve been mocking that stance on and off for six years.
But if that’s where he goes, he’ll at least have had an interesting ride there. It’s a long way from the marionette strings of a second-place boy band to being Weird Al’s sexier third cousin. And if he can’t touch the ersatz cool of someone like Bowie, Timberlake can at least say he’s the oddest outlier ever to lead a round of M-I-C-K-E-Y / M-O-U-S-E.