www.stereogum.com/2204934/justin-timberlake-justified-turns-20/reviews/the-anniversary/Justified Turns 20BY RACHEL BRODSKY
NOVEMBER 4, 2022
Writing about Justin Timberlake’s debut solo album on its 20th anniversary feels like messy business. It’s a case of two things being true: On one hand, Justified — Timberlake’s first foray away from *NSYNC, released 20 years ago this Saturday — was a professional triumph, showing the world how the Mouseketeer-turned-teen idol could launch a successful solo career; on the other hand, who did he trample on in order to achieve that? Some very famous women, as it turns out. Women who, despite their own career accolades, had already spent their lifetimes grappling with foundational patriarchal forces driving the music industry, the media, and society at large.
Now, I’m not suggesting that Timberlake should have spent time unpacking the way gender roles determine outcomes in the music industry in 2002. He was a 21-year-old bro-dude from Tennessee who became famous at a very, very early age. His brain was not finished developing yet, and a lot of people who get famous at a young age actually stop aging, emotionally speaking. (I’m really doing my best to be compassionate here.) And Timberlake is hardly the first person to write what essentially boils down to a breakup album.
But: There’s writing a breakup album to achieve emotional catharsis, and then there’s what Timberlake did. Late-*NSYNC Justin Timberlake wanted to be seen as a “serious” musician, and yes, he’d been through what sounds like a brutal breakup of a formative relationship. So he took elements from his personal life, spun them into a misogynist narrative, and stuck them into the commercial-music vending machine with a specific goal in mind: to get really, really famous. Just not boy-band famous.
Timberlake was at a curious crossroads in 2002. *NSYNC was on hiatus after releasing their fourth album, 2001’s Celebrity, and Timberlake had become the band’s de facto frontman, along with, to a certain extent, JC Chasez, who also tried, albeit with more limited success, to launch a solo career. As the Y2K boy-band boom began to level off, the label heads at Jive Records were no doubt eyeing Timberlake as their incoming cash cow, their next Michael Jackson. Timberlake seemed more than happy to oblige.
What Timberlake should have been held accountable for then (and arguably ever since) is the unforgivable way he gave himself over to his own ambition. In his 2007 memoir, former *NSYNC member Lance Bass wrote about the way Timberlake effectively broke up with *NSYNC by accusing the other four members of focusing too much on their own ventures. “He didn’t think any of us was operating in the best interest of the band,” Bass wrote at the time. “I asked him what he meant by that, and he said: ‘Well, you know, when y’all did your movie,’ meaning Joey [Fatone] and me [and their 2001 film On The Line].”
Bass continues: “I couldn’t believe it. That sounded like the lamest excuse imaginable. Joey and I looked at each other in amazement. According to Timberlake, the whole reason for the break up of *NSYNC was everyone else’s fault? That was crazy! All of us had done nothing but wait around for him to feel he was ready to start work on a new *NSYNC album.”
Then, there’s the most damning accusation of all — the way Bass connects the breakdown of Timberlake and Britney Spears’ relationship to Timberlake’s hunger for celebrity. Bass writes:
At the time, [Britney] struck me as an adorable little teenage girl at a perennial slumber party – staying up late and having a lot of fun. She showed no signs of the turmoil she would eventually encounter, maybe because she was so in love with Justin she thought it was going to last forever.
I knew it wouldn’t. Justin already had a great love in his life — his career. He wanted to be a star, and no girl, no matter how great, was going to be able to distract him from that for more than a night or two between trips to the center of the spotlight.
And hadn’t Justin made a movie (2000’s Model Behavior) the year before we did ours?
I felt completely betrayed… It pissed me off that Justin’s life got set up perfectly before he came back to the rest of us… Justin’s time to become a solo star had arrived.
Compare Bass’ read on the situation with Timberlake’s aw-shucks attitude while promoting Justified – any time he was asked about the album’s content that could be about Spears (and he was asked about it a lot), Timberlake’s demeanor was that of the bigger person. The wounded, wronged sad boi, but one who’ll be there for his ex should she really need him. As Timberlake told Barbara Walters in his infamous 20/20 interview: “I remember when we decided we were going to go our separate ways, we sat down and I said to [Britney], ‘If there’s ever a moment where you ever need me, you can rest assured that I will be there, because I love you as a person and I will always love you.’ But I also said, ‘Look, no matter what we say at this point people are going to speculate things, and I could really get myself in a horrible position if I was to say something and somebody misinterpreted, because that happens all the time.’ And I promised her that I wouldn’t say specifically why we broke up.”
Today, it’s long-understood celebrity lore that Justified — and its single “Cry Me A River” in particular — was a reaction to Spears’ (alleged) infidelity during her three-year relationship with Timberlake. Neither party to this day has ever said what really happened, but the audience/media response to “Cry Me A River” — and its thinly veiled music video where a Britney lookalike cheats on and abandons Timberlake — was wildly one-sided, to say the least. Timberlake seemed content be the bro-with-a-heart-of-gold victim while the media annihilated his ex. That shtick sold millions of records. It’s basically why The Bachelor franchise makes every contestant tell their individual sob stories to boost ratings. Today, doing what Timberlake did would seem nakedly cruel, like emotional revenge porn. In 2002 though? The words “revenge porn” didn’t exist yet. Timberlake looked like a sensitive nice-guy bro doing the absolute bare minimum by admitting he’d gotten hurt in a breakup.
Back to Timberlake’s ambition, though. Maybe I’m obsessing about extreme fame because I recently watched Tár, a movie that examines the costs of EGOT-level stardom (in the classical-music community, which serves as a stand-in for any artistic community) and who gets hurt in the process when someone with lofty ambitions treats all relationships as transactional. I’m not saying this is exactly what Timberlake has done, but I do think there are obvious parallels. And in the wake of the #FreeBritney movement, as well as the ongoing re-examination of Janet Jackson’s post-2004 Super Bowl career, audiences are rightly calling him out for taking advantage of — or at least being wayyyy too passive in — his early-career circumstances. Plus, Gen Z seems to think today’s Timberlake is extremely cringe, and they’re not wrong.
To grasp Timberlake’s hunger for an air of authenticity, you have to understand just how not-taken-seriously boy-band music was in the ’90s and early ’00s. Despite the dozens of TRL countdown victories, hundreds of sold-out arena concerts, and millions of albums sold, bands like *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys (as my colleague Tom Breihan has pointed out in his Number Ones column) tended not to produce #1 Billboard hits. Critically, boy bands earned eye rolls compared to what was perceived as being more legitimate musical acts of the time, acts that played their own instruments and catered to adults. In his 2003 Rolling Stone cover story, Timberlake sounds relieved that Justified had vaulted him up to the status of a real musician, telling the magazine: “Do I think that what I’ve done with [Justified] is 10 times better than anything *NSYNC has ever done? Yes, I do. But I’m a cocky bastard.” Yes, yes he is.
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