Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

I think that this album is mostly too dark/intense to recreate that situation, but it's too soon to tell really - I could imagine people singing along to "Damn Girl" perhaps. I don't think "mature" quite captures this album. It's more serious and intense and caught up in perfecting signifiers from other genres (hip hop, funk, Prince), and certainly pop albums have gone wrong before by focusing on these things rather than on simply great songs, but there's no reason why they can't also go right by doing this as well. In fact this is precisely what Justified did relative to Justin's N'Sync days, so it makes perfect sense that Justin would seek to go further down that path.

I agree that Justin is perhaps drawing as much or more from 90s Prince than 80s Prince, but for me this is actually a point in its favour (although I'd say it's more "Get Off"/"Sexy MF" Prince than, say, The Rainbow Children) - the dubiousness of this proposition relative to the safer option of emulating 80s Prince/MJ makes the album's success even more interesting. Though I recognise my argument rests on the premise that the album is a success.

And "Sexy MF" would be on my short list of least sexy songs of all time.

Which isn't to say that I might not wind up liking Future Love/Sex Sounds a lot, someday -- right, like maybe when a few tracks hit me as singles. (Confession: I originally liked Nick Carter's solo album more than Justified!!) Though I gotta say, most of what Tim's saying really does not make me optimistic.

Different kind of intensity, I'd argue: closer to how I'd use the word when talking about rap or dancehall, and it's not necessarily adverse to chart success either - I'd call "Get Busy" "intense" (nothing on FutureSex/LoveSounds is as good as "Get Busy" but "Get Busy" is one of the best songs ever - I must say though that I was surprised that it was as big as it was, I'd previously thought it was too relentless to be so successful).

Of course FutureSex/LoveSouinds will necessarily be a disappointment if you specifically want Justin to be "lively and effevescent and fun", this is pretty clear from even a superficial sampling of both records.

Whether that makes it a failure as a pop album is a different question of course, as a lot of pop music becomes better pop to the exact extent that it seeks to run away from those attributes - e.g. Kelly Clarkson is a better pop star when she's singing "Since You've Been Gone" or "Behind These Velvet Eyes" or even "Because Of You" than when she's singing "Walk Away" (not a bad song, mind). Which is not to say that these songs don't often end up also being lively and effervescent and fun in a different kind of way, but whatever that way is it's mediated through the music's statement that it is or does not want to be any of those things.

Quite a few people decried "Like I Love You" and "Cry Me A River" as being try-hard, pretentious, enslaved to standards of musicality or style which took them away from being good pop songs. And, as much as I disagreed with those people, I felt there was a kernel of truth there: esp. with "Like I Love You", at first I found all of the carefully underscored and highlighted stylistic decisions (the deliberately naturalist drums etc.) to be almost obnoxious in their desire to be noticed and valued. A couple of months of radio play totally normalised the song though and now it sounds basically like good pop (it helps that several people subsequently attempted to make their own equivalents of this song). And, more than that, it's not good pop in spite of all the affectations, but because of them.

PS. I would at least agree that "Sexy MF" isn't as sexy as it holds itself out to be. The same applies to all the songs with "Sex/Sexy" in their titles on Justin's album. Somehow though the allusion to/desire for/aspiration to/simulcrum of "sexiness" is totally endearing in both cases, and perhaps more loveable than actual sexiness would be (I tend to think it's a core component of Justin's success that he in fact falls so short of his intentions on so many levels).

For me a better pop album comparison point might be Madonna's Erotica (perhaps not-coincidentally my favourite Madonna album, followed by her debut).

actually, it's her duh-dunt-duh-duh (you know, the sound you hear before people yell "charge!"), not her la-la-la-la. and the song ends with a christopher walken imitator requesting more cowbell!

yeah that's a perfectly sensible position even if I disagree with it.. (...except... Ray of Light? JUSTIN's Ray of Light? Really?)

i don't really think of it as dark and would agree that 'cry me a river' is darker than anything here, though i know what tim means by intense - there's something in the loving attention to texture throughout which is very overwhelming, the way each sliver of sound seems completely perfect. i disagree that it forfeits energy and fun, too, but it's a different kind of fun: slicker, more poised, less bouncy and innocent. i actually think 'rock your body' is the worst justin single to date though i do like it, but to my ears 'lovestoned', 'sexyback' and 'chop me up' are more than its equal in terms of dancefloor fun.

i could see an argument in saying the justified singles are superior to the fs/ls ones, though bear in mind we've only had two of the latter (and i think 'my love' is the best yet, but then i would). and i'm not usually one to rate consistent albums over albums with great singles - but fs/ls is just such a coherent statement that it makes justified seem even more singles-and-filler than it did at the time.

bearing in mind that i also think erotica is, like, madonna's PINNACLE (and by extension pop music in general's pinnacle), we may have to put this down to never-the-twain-shall-meet differing tastes.

Do you really not like "Rock Your Body" so much?

both erotica and fs/ls are cumulatively dark rather than song-by-song dark (though erotica much much more so, in that 'in this life' and 'bad girl' are much more staring-into-the-void than anything justin tries to do, and erotica explicitly deals with death as well as sex - justin's crack song, as good as it is, is not quite so bleak). but yeah, the darker moments somehow infect the less overt songs and make them dark by proxy.

the most successful dark moment on fs/ls is the '...comes around' coda! i'm not so keen on 'what goes around' because i feel it does absolutely nothing to build on the template already perfected by 'cry me a river' and 'nowhere', but the coda just sounds so...vitriolic and vengeful, and totally makes the song.

Tim's comparison's good, but I heart Erotica and _hate_ FS/LS.

"My Love" is OK. But then again, I only really liked "Rock Your Body" off the first one because it was such a joyous ray of technicolour exuberance. But at least Justified had actual SONGS ON IT.

Why are you trying to reason with me on this? My JT hate is well documented and rather irrational.

I've only heard three tracks from the Timberlake - this won't stop me from jumping into this convo when I get the chance, but I have a lot to do in the next five days. Haven't even done my song of the day yet. It'll probably be JoJo's "This Time," prod. by Scott Storch, may be even better than Brooke's "About Us" and Paris's "Jealousy" and Storch's two big Chris Brown hits. Almost up there with "Baby Boy." Very minimal when it comes to songishness: beats, chanting, talking, sweet keyb plinks, orchestral hums, quick doubled-up harmony voices inserted as beats, microseconds at a time.

Anyway, there's this one with before/after-surgery Ashlee pics along with surprisingly sober assesments from plastic surgeons.

Her chin is partially gone, along with the bump in her nose. She's plumping her lips with, one assumes, collagen and has had her brows lifted. She's 23 and getting Botox.

Right now, she basically looks like nobody, an anony-bot Maxim-ready girl thing. But that's right now--at this rate, she's a couple surgeries away from Jackson-ville.

Rarely has 'prettiness' been so eerie.

OK Mark, now that you're here, what do you think of Aly & A.J.?

One track I do like a fair bit is "Like That" - it has a hook like a playground chant. It's sweet. The retro stylings (a la Disc 2 of the Xtina album) in her two co-writes are also at least interesting.

Incidentally, UK edition has a different running order to the US one, as well as the usual bonus tracks. One of these is "Leave (Get Out)"! The fact that the presence of "Leave" is prominently mentioned on a sticker on the CD cover suggests Universal don't have much confidence in the new material.

Listening to Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right": Far more beautiful than "Maneater" or "Promiscuous," and the producer touches (is it Timbaland?) are a lot less intrusive and irritating (seems to me they should be less intrusive still, but that background "hey" is designed for poignancy and draws the involuntary pang from me). Furtado is riding her own ache too consistently, but she doesn't oversing it. And juxtaposed against the dirty-oil-drum sound of the toms, the ache aches evocatively.

"one sided" on now. beat sorta resembles "it's like that" by run-dmc.

which reminds me: am i the only person who thinks the beat of the first track on justin's new album sounds like "another one bites the dust"? except "another one bites the dust" was a way livelier song. (talk about minimalist art-funk moves: 1980 ruled, with queen's hit and "emotional rescue" both trying so hard to be the flying lizards.)