Results tagged “justintimberlake”

We just finished watching HBO's broadcast of Justin Timberlake's FutureSex tour, which I (unsurprisingly) quite enjoyed. It seems like he's done a good bit since his last tour to incorporate his strong live band and his rapidly improving chops on guitar and keyboards to integrate real musicianship into the show.

Those were the primary things I wanted to see more of four years ago, when I wrote about his live show at the Roseland here in NYC. If you liked that post, you might also enjoy "SexyBack": Pop for indie rock MP3 blogs.

Details offers a lengthy and fairly credible interview with Justin Timberlake:

Timberlake is not a kiss-ass. Selling more than 13 million records has earned him a lot of rope, and he knows that. He relishes battles with his label, Jive, about single-release choices (“SexyBack” was his call. The label, he says, was “scared shitless”), dictates tour demands (no more than four shows a week), and claims he generally doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks.

“I tried so hard to be an R&B artist [on his first solo album, Justified] and it was the pop album of the year, and I was like, ‘Fuck. That’s the last thing I wanted,’” Timberlake says, taking a swig from another can of cream soda. “But I was like, ‘So everyone considers me a pop artist? Well, fuck it. I’m going to do whatever I want to do.’”

But moonwalking the line between manchild and hipster mascot is tough. On one hand, Timberlake beams when he recalls a recent article in the New York Times about punk fans who unexpectedly love him. On the other, he says he resents feeling like he owes indie rockers an apology for his candy-pop past.

And if you liked Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, you might be pleased to know that Justin's tour rider specifies strawberry jelly, not grape. Though of course, at his recent show in Ohio, that mandate was ignored. Oh, the humanity!

Okay, these are the links you should be reading on the Internet today.

• A smart diagram is the new clever writing: LeisureArts charts out my favorite snowclone. I covered similar topics before in The Story of America and Do you love words? The diagram is excerpted here.

• The New York Times reports on Justin Timberlake's new audience. "Unlike his former boy-band colleagues, Mr. Timberlake has even won over musicians who prefer lo-fi thrash to the slicker sounds of mainstream albums." These hipsters could have been five years ahead of the curve if they'd just have listened to me.

• Misidentified Black Person of the Week. A disturbingly familiar story about mistaken captions, which references my post about the same topic a couple of years ago. Somehow this really stuck with me, perhaps because I was reading this cogent explanation of the problem with "articulate" at the same time. "It is amazing that this still requires clarification, but here it is. Black people get a little testy when white people call them 'articulate'." So, two notes for editors: Get people's names right, and be respectful. Not so hard!

• Speaking of respect, Why didn't Prince get electrocuted while playing electric guitar in the rain at the Superbowl? Because he's Prince, people!

• So it turns out there actually may be some Hunanese origins for General Tso's chicken. I've been using General Tso's chicken as the definitive example of how I became clueful about eating good food ("It's not even a real Chinese dish -- I'm a dummy!"), but I like this story of how it's a creation of cross-cultural entrepreneurism even better. I wonder if my family members in Taiwan have ever tried the "delectable concoction of lightly battered chicken in a chili-laced sweet-sour sauce".

• I'm hoping danah won't be offended if I call her defense of walled gardens articulate. It's also thought-provoking, which is high praise indeed.

• On the flip side of the walled garden conversation is PB's ongoing onfocus series about getting off the grid. The technology here is interesting, but I'm enjoying watching the thought process behind the coding that Paul has been doing.

• And finally, Google is going to start to charge some businesses for Google Apps for Your Domain. I find that refreshing and reassuring.

• "Two of the most financially successful Web 2.0 personalities ... are rooting for the financial failure of their competitors." Hmm. I tend to root for the success of our company's competitiors, because I want the entire industry to be healthy, I think the competition is good for all of us, and because I actually give a damn about the web. I'm not sure if I believe the sentiment that's quoted above, but I do know there are lots of people who take digs at their competitors or wish them ill. In the long term, this is a self-correcting problem. Be careful what you wish for, etc.

• On a not-entirely-unrelated note, congratulations, Jason. A break is well-deserved, and a lot of what Mena said about Ev applies here as well.

• What's it look like after people have rooted for your failure but you make it work anyway? It looks like a WSJ profile of marca. I remember being in high school and my Morrissey-listening friends would tell me they would hate it if I became successful.

• 
  What was that about successful friends? Dear Flickr team: Did you know the official Justin Timberlake SexyBack Tour Photo Contest happens to run as a Flickr photo group? I'm also pretty entertained by the cover of the new album, FutureSex / LoveSounds, which is pictured here. (See also: my earlier review of SexyBack, the lead single.)

• The other kids aren't listening to Justin Timberlake, they're listening to Kelly Clarkson! So says the wildly erratic Google Music Trends, which relies on the apparently completely unreliable "Now Playing" status of Google Talk to determine song popularity.

• Want to talk to Google Talk users without using Google's system at all? For free? Using open source software? Hmm, that sounds interesting... Act now and we'll throw in a free Jabber server.

• If you're not sick of me yet, pick up this month's Wired. The story's not online yet, but I talk a bit about spam blogs (as mentioned by Steve Rubel) but come off sounding a little half-witted at points. That's okay.

• And finally, some outstanding conversations have started based on my talk at MeshForum a few months ago. Slouching Toward the Era of Quality of Life, What blogspace needs now and Audience and purpose in blogging all delighted me with the great ideas that seemed to come from these bloggers thinking out loud on their sites. I like it when my ideas' competitors succeed.

My reign as most verbose Justin Timberlake fanboy on the Internet is not yet complete. Thus, some links to augment the review of "SexyBack".

• The Observer has a lengthy review/interview on the eve of the publicity tour for FutureSex/LoveSounds:
  

  He's off again. 'SexyBack', an urgent, pulsing track, a cocktail of soaring, distorted vocals and heavy, electronic chords threaded together with rap, seems to be the album's mission statement. Like many of his new songs, it is musically complex; a fusion of rap, rock, funk, soul, gospel, new wave, opera, world music... everything, really. But it certainly does sexy alright: everyone's nodding their heads and mopping their brows, and it's only 8.40am. While the futuristic element looms large - 'the musical landscape of Tron', as someone rather lyrically describes it - Timberlake's familiar percussive beats and high, soulful voice are all still very much in place. 'That's the Prince influence,' he says of the vocals.

• Kelefa Sanneh in The New York Times points out that pop music is supposed to be sexy. Let's see here...
  

  Plenty of male pop stars through the ages have flaunted their own appeal. But it’s been nearly two decades since Prince posed naked on the cover of “Lovesexy” (perhaps that coinage helped inspire “SexyBack”), and the taboo against male preening is stronger than ever. For example, “Sexy Love,” a hit by the R&B singer Ne-Yo, conforms to the current status quo: unlike Mr. Timberlake, Ne-Yo goes out of his way to let listeners know he’s describing a woman (“I’m so addicted to how she’s the sweetest drug”), not himself.

• The requisite link to Justified, Justin Timberlake's debut solo album. Highly recommended.

• An interesting Stylus Magazine article reassessing Wham's Music from the Edge of Heaven. Money quote: "The ‘80s analogue to Justin isn’t Jacko, but George Michael, and not (just) ‘cause he’s a whiter shade of pale." I disagree, but it's worth a read.

• I mentioned Pitchfork and ILX (a.k.a. I Love Music). I didn't realize a significant number of my readers don't know these sites; They're the web's best sources for pretentious record reviews and pretentious record reviewers, respectively. I say that with no small amount of admiration, since I spent some time with music critics in one of my past lives. At least the ILM crew tends to have a sense of humor. I figured there'd be a thread for me, and hey whadaya know? Here it is.

• Oh, and despite my hate of jargon, some slipped in last time. "EPK" is the record-industry abbreviation for an electronic press kit; When you see stock footage of an artist plugging their record to an anonymous interviewer, or see the same 3 quotes about their new album show up in every press review, you're seeing the results of a well-constructed EPK. Think of it as a very elaborate multimedia press release.

Four years is a long time in pop music, but that's how long it's been since Justin Timberlake's "Like I Love You" heralded his launch as a solo singer and led the parade of singles from Justified. But it's summertime, time for hit singles, and this time JT's got "SexyBack".

It's not an instant classic; Neither was "Like I Love You". Part of the reason for this is that modern music marketing for massive artists holds that the best practice is the counterintuitive habit of not always leading with an album's strongest single. Instead, the label will put out a strong first single, especially one that plays to deeper demographics that form an artist's core. For many artists, this takes the form of a club-oriented track, a dance remix, a guest appearance on a mix tape, or in rare cases, promo-only singles that don't even end up on the album. (Beyonce's cover of 50 Cent's "In Da Club" was probably the best example of this, helping to set up "Crazy In Love".)

Of course, the jaw-dropper from Justified was "Cry Me a River", one of the great pop singles of all time. Hearing Nick Lachey's similarly-themed based-on-a-public-breakup "What's Left of Me" reminds us how truly abysmal such a song had every reason to be.

So, Justin's leading with a club-oriented track that features (the increasingly prominent) Timbaland and a female vocal buried in the mix that sure sounds a hell of a lot like Janet Jackson. Of course, given Justin's falsetto, this could just be a processed version of his own voice, but the nod to nipplegate would be a savvy way of giving the single a bounce when the "secret" leaked out. There's also rumors that Nelly Furtado, having been around the studio when the album was made, might be the voice in question.

And of course, these are the two factors that most influence the single: Justin effectively lost his black pass during halftime at the SuperBowl, and his vocals on this track are dramatically different from anything he's done before.

Timberlake, of course, lost his permission to appropriate for having distanced himself (or at least appearing to) from Janet in the wake of the nipplegate scandal. There was a halfhearted attempt by Gwen Stefani to get some credibility with black radio on her own solo album, but essentially there are almost no other white artists who get significant airplay on black radio. The argument's been made that this credibility made Justin Timberlake's most direct pop ancestor George Michael rather than the obvious Michael Jackson, but I think the parallels are thin. (I say that as someone intimately familiar with the entirety of all three of their solo catalogs.) It remains to be seen whether Timbaland, returning from their work on Justified, will lend him enough credit to overcome the resistance this time around.

Then there's the vocals. Timberlake's press tour (and the EPK for the new single) both have him touting people like David Bowie as influences on the heavily-distorted lower range vocals on SexyBack. And sure, if you try, you can squint your ears and hear the echoes of Faaaame in the track. But in the context of the song, Timberlake comes across sounding like nothing so much as J.C. Chasez, his former N*SYNC bandmate, whose own solo album closely followed Justified's release, if not its climb up the chart.

Not to question Timberlake's sincerity in listing his influences, but given how cannily he's managed both the production and promotion of his work, his nod to artists whose careers peaked commercially before he was born indicate that he might have a broader game in mind. In fact, now that even the stodgiest corners of the music business have acknowledged the influence of the online independent music media, it might be an attempt to push them even further out of their usual indie rock corner and into a fuller embrace of unabashed pop singles.

The song works, although the James Brown-style shoutouts to "take 'em to the chorus" and "take 'em to the bridge" seem forced. As interesting as the single, though, is the idea that Timberlake is shaping his messages around the record to appeal to the Pitchfork or ILX crowd, tipping his (now-retired?) fedora to their favorites in order to curry their favor.