JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE USED TO BE COOL. WHAT HAPPENED?
SINGER APPEARS TO BE A LITTLE TONE DEAF WHEN IT COMES TO CULTURAL APPROPRIATION.
Justin Timberlake, at least on the surface, is having a terrific year.
His “Man of the Woods” album debuted atop the charts. He performed at the Super Bowl halftime show. His current tour, which includes Wednesday and May 25 stops at Toyota Center, is selling out across the country. (He returns in January for a third show.)
All pretty golden, right? But at the same time, Timberlake has increasingly alienated big pockets of his once-mighty fanbase.
It started in 2016 with Timberlake’s series of tone-deaf tweets about actor and activist Jesse Williams’ speech at the BET Awards. Williams decried, among other things, cultural appropriation, saying, “And we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, black gold.”
Timberlake tweeted he was “inspired,” not realizing that to some, he was one of the white artists profiting from the use of black culture in his sound and style. When the Twitterverse called him out on it, Timberlake semiapologized but dug deeper, saying, “I really do feel that we are all one … A human race.”
That sounds a lot like #alllivesmatter.
The exchange also highlighted Timberlake’s lack of responsibility after the fallout from his performance with Janet Jackson at Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston. We know the story. He tore her costume, revealing a breast covered by a nipple plate, for less than a second. Her career suffered immense damage. His did not.
That was ages ago, right? Even those grossly unaware tweets are two years old.
But Timberlake was invited back to the Super Bowl stage this year, a move that reeked of double standards and privilege, racism and sexism. And during pre-show interviews, he still failed to take much responsibility for the 2004 fiasco in Houston.
“I stumbled through it, to be quite honest,” he told Zane Lowe of Beats 1 this year. “I had my wires crossed, and it’s just something that you have to look back on and go, like, ‘OK, well you know, you can’t change what’s happened but you can move forward and learn from it.’ ”
It’s anyone’s guess if Timberlake has learned anything. He could have invited Jackson to join him at this year’s halftime show. (He didn’t even invite *NSYNC.) Instead, he made what seems like a pointed jab at her during “Rock Your Body.” During the 2004 performance, Timberlake ripped Jackson’s top after singing the lyric, “I’m gonna have you naked by the end of this song.” This year, he yelled “Stop!” and smirked just before reaching that line in the song.
His Prince tribute at this year’s Super Bowl also felt disingenuous, given the pair’s history. Timberlake dissed Prince more than once, most notably in the 2007 song “Give It to Me.” (“We missed you on the charts last week/Damn, that’s right, you wasn’t there.”)
And then there’s “Man of the Woods,” a lukewarm collection Timberlake referred to as “an American album” during an interview with Country Living. The accompanying artwork has him in flannel and denim next to pickup trucks.
Timberlake has stressed that this is not a country album. But there’s still a good ol’ boy vibe to much of the aesthetic. And he revisits that 2016 Twitter blowup on “Say Something.”
“Sometimes the greatest way to say something is to say nothing at all,” he sings.
And sometimes the greatest way is to actually say something once in while.