Justin Timberlake in 2013

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.

I don't see Tunnel Vision or Let The Groove Get In or Don't Hold The Wall being any more devotional or comfortable than Lovestoned or Summer Love or whatever.

Plus, FS/LV has 4 songs w love in the title vs 20's 1. Settled.

well an album can be full of love songs without requiring critics to then make the leap to saying 'oh they must be about his marriage!!' but critics did

and rihanna can make an album full of songs about dangerous doomed love featuring chris brown without requiring people to assume "oh they must be about her relationship" i guess, idk biographical criticism is dodgy ground but the sotosian line of considering it irrelevant at all times is equally dubious imo

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

about having sex in the future

I just don't hear anything in these lyrics that wasn't already there before. Same vague platitudes you'd get on lots of pop albums.
What leads you to imagine an autobiographical slant?

for sure! i think it's a useful angle to take at times, but at other times criticism from that angle feels for a lack of effervescence, as it does here. i don't subscribe to the strong position of the intentional fallacy btw. i do think that it's a deceptively comfortable position to take w/r/t tons of art, where youre like, well i dont quite know how to verbalize my reaction to the art itself... so let me talk about the artist and her life for 500 words!! i can wikipedia that. and people can relate, it'll be a human interest story.

yes, the "Access Hollywood" approach to art, which is reductive and almost always goes with calling the artist by first name

Wait, how is a song with the word 'groove' in the title intentional too long in some elaborate attempt at rockist canonization rather than being just, you know, wanting to jam for as long as they wanted because who's going to stop them?

hell if I could I'd call Prince "Nelson."

the thing is most (good) reviews of both rihanna and JT albums talked about the bio stuff for a bit and ALSO talked about the general positioning and ALSO crucially talked about the music quite a lot (as katherine did), so acting like everyone's just lazily landing on the gossip angle for clicks is just...did you even read it

ha – I said katherine's article was one of my favorites for precisely that reason

yes, and I pointed out what I didn't agree with! what are you angry about, lex

yes, the "Access Hollywood" approach to art, which is reductive and almost always goes with calling the artist by first name

it's just as reductive to pretend you can divorce the music and personal lives of most big pop artists, especially now, when their private lives are as much a part of their brand as the clothes they wear or the music they make,

i'm not angry, i'm vaguely irritated at your perennial habit of twisting the stuff you criticise into something that it's not so your own case is stronger (which you just did again by calling me angry)

holy shit I realized I am the only person to do have ever done that on ILX

Bowie's not a Big Pop Artist anymore but this review is exactly the kind of let's say formalist take that works and doesn't even mention biography.

you are definitely not the only person to do that

xp

alfred would you seriously review, say, "nobody's business" by rihanna ft. chris brown without once mentioning biography. like really? it's totally irrelevant? you gotta be formalist at all times? the artists' lives have no bearing on how that song was released and received by fans?