Justin Timberlake in 2013

Yep. Nothing worse than a purported suave dude not noticing the mud puddle.

revisited the "suit & tie" video today and it's way appropriate that jay's performing his verse while sitting down, like guy is gonna straight up nap at any time during this verse

lol

"get out your seat, hov"

h to the zzzzz o

He's a believable suave fuck cuz he's a dork.

word

i think maybe an ultimate failure of "suit & tie" is that rap verses on timberlake singles (clipse, t.i.) have been smooth in a real and effective way ("at the mall kids ask how the chain glow / point at her say, wow that's the same glow / point to me, i say yeah that's the same dough") which helps play up timberlake's endearing goofiness. jay-z is just as bumbling on "suit & tie" tho.

― A$AP Rovi (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, March 20, 2013 6:24 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

hah I kind of hear an inverse - like jay is rapping "this is truffle season / time for tuxedos for no reason", tryna deliver a real michelin 3-star verse, but jt is singing "so thick i now know why they call it a fatty"

has jay had a good verse on like anything in years? i can't really remember one

he has a handful of genuinely good verses on 'watch the throne'

his stuff on "otis", "niggas in paris" and "gotta have it" is all pretty great

uggghhh that fatty line

xp wellllllll.....

i think jay's awesome on "suit and tie"

^

"wait does "katherine" here = kt st. a?"

yeah that's me. so:

- re: the biographical criticism stuff, probably could've gone into more detail on that (but it was toward the end and I'd already blown way, way past my word count). the thing is I've read a lot of reviews with tossed-off statements like "you can really sense how happy Justin Timberlake is after marrying Jessica Biel, this album is like a wedding gift" (no shots, I'm paraphrasing, I've read so many reviews I've forgotten who wrote what), and it seems... weirdly hollow. like, I kind of feel like if you did a side-by-side comparison of the amount critics cared about Justin Timberlake's marriage to Jessica Biel, or really about Jessica Biel at all, before and after this album, the bar graph would be pretty skewed.

I can see why they're in there, though; the album's pretty clearly trying to do the thing where the artist bakes whatever biographical details are available into the album, as branding (sigh) and to give it more oomph (more gravitas or more buzziness, depending on who it is; compare this to, say, Unapologetic. same idea, different outcomes.) take Beyonce's recent... thing; the only way it works is if you care about Beyonce as a public figure and her marriage to Jay-Z as a public thing, otherwise a line like "don't think I'm just his little wife" comes off like, I dunno, a chopped-and-screwed Nellie McKay song? and I think Timberlake's trying to do the same thing, but just taking it as a given that his marriage is a Sufficently Big Deal to elevate hismaterial. on "Mirrors," say, the difference between "self-indulgent and weirdly narcissistic song supposedly about love" and "paean to Justin Timberlake's newlywed bliss" is primarily whether you accept that biographical criticism.

- re: lyrics: I pretty consistently care more about them than most people, but even so the ones here are so bad they fall right past "ignorable" to "so bad they're actively distracting and break whatever spell might've happened." (it's not a coincidence that "Cry Me a River" and "What Goes Around" get so much praise; they're the ones without any stupid shit.) and again, if this is supposed to be a happy-marriage album it should, at minimum, evoke a marriage one might like to be in? right?

- re: robin thicke, I don't really have a strong opinion either way (haven't heard the new song); he exists, he's getting probably the right level of praise for what he does, good for him

I kind of feel like if you did a side-by-side comparison of the amount critics cared about Justin Timberlake's marriage to Jessica Biel, or really about Jessica Biel at all, before and after this album, the bar graph would be pretty skewed.

otom

*otm rather

i honestly am still not 100% sure who jessica biel is or what she has been in or what she looks like

she's known for the wb

she was in stealth

she's known for not being the actress you think she is when you hear her name

(in my experience, anyway)

she played lt. kara wade in stealth

or, actually, better (and blindingly obvious) example: "Cry Me a River" got so big in part because people thought "holy shit, this is about Britney Spears." it's a good song, but if you're a pop artist the difference between a good song and a classic song is often decided by stuff like that.

sam shepard played capt. george cummings in stealth, does that help lex?

lol balls

on my first listen to 20/20 i did wonder whether "this is a love album for my wife" would be a more palatable angle than "this album signifies my return to my first love...MUSIC" but by my second listen i didn't care

never even heard of stealth or the wb :/

lol. well to be more specific she was on seventh heaven, a show on the wb , like dawsons creek & c

i guess what i'm trying to (perhaps thwartedly) say is bad lyrics can and often are carried off with a degree of panache and that panache gets right to the heart of jt's essential appeal - what this album gambles big on. it's totally not a question of ignorable and i would v much dispute the implication jt's popular acceptance is based on his most sensible cuts as stated ('what goes', 'cmar')

thicke comparison can be disregarded now since he totally just faced me

haven't/won't read any reviews of this but could imagine any 'o he's married' angle to new album beyond lazy auteurism/rockism (i mean ppl do these bio heavy readings if the angle even remotely presents itself)(ray of light, blood on the tracks, taylor swift) being he sounds relaxed, happy, newlywed. album the sound more of a guy bringing home wife flowers or emailing her on a shoot than desperate single looking to bed some girl at the club or throw shade at some girl at the club he bedded last week.

Flowerzsex/Lovetulipz

I just don't think JT has that kind of panache, though. showmanship, sure, but he's more believable when he's trying to be a bit of a lech. (obviously I'm in the minority generally on this point.)

urgent and key

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9VOS3CnYQ

totally changed the way i hear 'i'm on a beach' or whatever.

tbf the only genre where 'i'm happy, married, let's stay in and watch scandal' consistently yields more compelling results than 'i'm horny, single, let's go out and try to nail some chick that looks like kerry washington in the right light' is country music, even w/ grown ass adults r&b it's a 50/50 proposition. pop music (and as much as this is pretty r&b for timberlake and very r&b for a pop artist in 2013 this is still a pop record, at least as much as faith was, more so than bedtime stories) can very very very rarely have someone even attempt it, nevermind pull it off (madonna looked like she might but she freaked out over a wrinkle or something one day and we've had her + timberlake or her + nicki ever since, she's turned into lauren hutton in once bitten).

But Justin Timberlake is that kind of star where his brand and his person and his art melts together. Like, his life is part of his album, which is in some way just an excuse to go on SNL and Fallon and to tour. A pseuso-biographical reading is def okay, since the album is about JT the star anyway. It's a weird star-thing... It's like... it's perhaps a bit like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: In some ways James Stewart and John Wayne are way too old to play their characters, but them playing these roles mean a lot because of all the baggage they have from earlier. Like, some people have a star-brand, and how they handle that brand is a big bart of what their stuff is all about.

Sorry, if it's a bit confused, but I'm slightly drunk.

Reverend = OTM; Lex = (uncharacteristically) OFFTM. Dunno why - can I preemptively predict that Lex will hate the Knife album?

Feel like it's pretty easy to ignore (or not be aware in the first place) that this is his marriage record, tbh.
I never dig deep on JT lyrics (why bother?) and these don't seem any different from whatever he was singing on the first two albums.

Who's hyped about framing this as a "real" album about "adult marriage" anyway? JT or journos? I haven't seen any interviews w JT (again...why bother?), but a lot of the reviews mention Biel and his bid for being taken seriously (via long songs).

Listening to it, I just don't hear it as a bid for "authentic importance" or as a love letter to J Biel... seems a fun pop trifle like the others. Maybe I'm missing something?

songs too long to be trifles

trifle has nothing to do with song length though.

there are a million trifles by *pick your pop singer* that are twice as long as "important" songs by *pick your acknowledged cultural music hero*.

trifle season!

let's get timberlake's stance on it:

"When we were making the record I said, 'If Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin can do 10-minute songs and Queen can do 10-minute songs then why can't we?' We'll figure out the radio edits later.''

wow. that's pretty goofy.

ah well!

Is that supposed to be damning? My opinion of those bands ranges from love to, at worst, ambivalence, none of which has any bearing on this album. What he's doing isn't really in any way similar to what those bands were up to, in spite of what he says. And since when is an artist the most reliable person to critique their own work?

Song lengths weren't a thing for me.

Look at the length of the tracks on Prince's 1999... (also, if you wanna talk about outros)

And, I don't know, the first track on Songs in the Key of Life is over 7 minutes long, and final track is over 8 minutes.

Now this ain't one of those albums but I don't know, I felt what he was going for.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/289889/intentional-fallacy

tbh i'm still not even sure if you need to hear this album as being about his marriage; everybody itt sort of acknowledges that JT is a horrible lyricist and that, maybe CMAR aside, we didn't really enjoy his songs for his lyrical content. with bey it's def different, right, especially because her vocal performance is front and center of every song and she explicitly addresses her haters! but I don't really hear JT doing anything at all similar. the echo chamber w/r/t his marriage in the press around this album seems more the product of laziness/trying to meet wordcounts before rushing off to review the bowie album. idk.

what was the biographical subtext of FS/LS? was there one. did JT get a time machine

No, it's not different for bey, because we don't judge her songs by assuming her intent or purpose.

there isn't really any echo chamber around JT's marriage? it wasn't part of the marketing angle or promo blurbs. it's arisen because this album is full of quite devotional, comfortable love songs

like it's about the only recurring angle based on the actual music

"When we were making the record I said, 'If Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin can do 10-minute songs and Queen can do 10-minute songs then why can't we?' We'll figure out the radio edits later.''

also, while rev otm that who cares what artists say, this is relevant because it bolsters the argument that JT wants to do 10-minute songs because he thinks that's what you do to be a credible canonical artist, not because the songs demand it. or as katherine put it so concisely and correctly in her review - "It’s runtime solely as conspicuous consumption — and as rockist cred"

operative word is SOLELY - his intentions wouldn't matter if the songs benefited from this decision but they.just.don't.at.all.