14. Justin's 20/20 experience
He's, like, a mirror
The noughties are a decade in search of a scapegoat, and Justin Timberlake is as good a choice as anyone. Actually, that’s not really true. As the Slate profile I linked to last week pointed out, Justin was riding the wave of his own fame as much as any female performer of that era. He had certain allowances that they did not, and he personally made or participated in decisions that look terrible in retrospect (quick summary: dressing like the Boston Strangler for the “Cry Me a River” video, trash talking Britney’s virginity in exchange for airplay, leaving Janet Jackson to bear the Super Bowl flak by herself), but there are other men who were both less prominent and more influential when it came to shaping the Upskirt Decade’s culture.
A few candidates to consider. Pharrell Williams, who — as half of production duo the Neptunes — worked with both Britney and Justin, effectively playing both sides at the same time, helping to craft both her hypersexed child-woman persona (“Slave 4 U”) and his edgy nice-guy front (“Like I Love You”); who wrote and produced “Blurred Lines”, and of course appeared in the Benny Hill-esque video; and who was accused by Kelis last year (alongside his Neptunes colleague Chad Hugo) of ripping her off so she made no money from her first two albums.
Or how about mega-producer Max Martin: it’s astonishing to hear people credulously repeating his claim that he didn’t know that Britney singing the chorus “hit me baby one more time” sounded like a sixteen-old-girl imploring a lover to hit her (one more time). English was his second language, yada yada, whevs — I’d like to hear his innocent explanation for the lyric to “I’m Not a Girl (Not Yet a Woman)”. Or Max Martin protege Dr Luke, writer and producer of some of the noughties’ champion bangers (“I Kissed a Girl”, “Since U Been Gone”, “Tik Tok”),1 and accused by the singer Kesha of stifling her career and sexually assaulting her. (Dr Luke denies all Kesha’s allegations and has counter-sued her.)
But none of those options has Justin’s uncanny Being There-esque talent for, well, being there when bad things happened. And besides, though the charges against Pharrell and Dr Luke are more serious than the ones against Justin, they’re also more slippery. It’s hard for people to get agitated about the contents of a contract, and besides, Pharrell has an extraordinary ability to coast through whatever he’s involved in without getting sullied. (How did the man who wrote what was widely acknowledged as the unofficial anthem of rape culture get a puff piece from Stylist three years later calling him a feminist?)
The Dr Luke issue is, if anything, too serious to stick: it would be actually libelous to take Kesha’s claims at face value, given they haven’t so far persuaded anybody in a courtroom. And, full disclosure, I don’t know what I think about them — partly, I suspect, because I don’t want to know what I think about them, because I don’t want to have to deal with a reality where several (more) of my favourite songs become problematic. And anyway, he’s backroom talent so only nerds really know who he is. Even Max Martin, who is about the most famous producer in the world, is obscure relative to the acts he worked with: however powerful his part in shaping noughties pop culture, he’s simply not going to attract either the credit he deserves, or the blame.
But we all know who Justin is. He’s a straight white man, which in the crude arithmetic of privilege now makes criticising him into “punching up”. We all remember him smirking over Britney’s humiliation, we all remember him standing next to Janet Jackson with her bustier cup in his hand (not in fact a wardrobe malfunction, according to the stylist responsible, but a lighting malfunction — the lights should have cut as the fabric was ripped away, creating a suggestion of nakedness rather than visible bare flesh). And we all saw him getting away with this unscathed for the best part of two decades.
One of the saddest parts of the way Britney v Justin played out is that she chose not to burn him. “Sweet Dreams My LA Ex” (recorded eventually by Rachel Stevens) was reportedly written for Britney as an answer song to “Cry Me a River”, and it would have been colossal: a cold-blooded diss to an ex who can’t let go, with a stiletto-sharp warning that he might have his own share of things to feel shamed by. But she passed on it: her commentary on their relationship would be the sweetly apologetic ballad “Everytime” instead (a song with an incredibly disturbing video in which Britney dies and is reborn as a baby — according to the director David LaChappelle, the concept was entirely her own).
Justin was playing the game of stardom with all the tools available to him. And Britney, in this instance, was not playing at all. I think it would probably have been much better for her profile, and certainly made for a smoother transition from “baby Britney” to “hot Britney”, if she’d recorded “Sweet Dreams” and then referred any intrusive questions about Justin to that lyric. What would stop her doing that? Perhaps she just didn’t think the song was right. Or perhaps she took the breakup too seriously to turn it into PR fodder.
What he did was wrong, in the sense that it is obviously immoral to talk about someone you’ve been close to the way he talked about Britney; but he was also acting within the rules of engagement for celebrity. Remember, they were on the same label and she was the bigger act at the time of “Cry Me a River”, so Jive must have judged this to be at the minimum an acceptable price for one star to bear in order to launch another, or even (erroneously) for this to be a net benefit to her in terms of publicity and image. In a way, she was the one who broke the compact of the tabloids when she opted out of the public fight.2
Double standards are hard to identify when they’re working in your favour. With the Super Bowl nightmare, I wonder whether Justin realised at the time (whether he could have realised) that while he and Janet were superficially handling the same PR nightmare, she was doing so under a totally different set of conditions to him because of her sex. I don’t think anyone involved, whether from his camp or hers, was prepared for the fact that this mishap was replayable: the most Tivo-ed moment in history, and an inspiration for the founding of YouTube, whose creators realised people wanted an easy way to share video clips.
As broadcast, it was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment of awkwardness. With digital technology, it was an eternal humiliation — for her. Yes, he should have stepped up and coordinated his response with hers, but also her people should have leveraged her greater star power to force him to do so. No one effectively managed this crisis, I suspect, because no one had dealt with a crisis quite like this before. The 20/20 vision of hindsight was no more available to him then than it was to anyone else.
I don’t say this to let Justin off the hook. He did the things he did, and he’s culpable for them. I say this because it’s important to remember that he wasn’t the sole agent involved here, and nor was he blessed with pure agency (his manager when he was with N*Sync was Lou Pearlman, and if you want a villain for the noughties, Pearlman’s relentless dedication to ripping off his charges and, according to many, sexually exploiting the the boys he worked with would make him a prime candidate). There’s a desire to hold Justin responsible now for the fact that he wasn’t held responsible earlier, and that, at least, is something he can fairly say was not his fault.
What would you like to personally hold Justin Timberlake accountable for? Comment or reply to let me know! And if you’ve got any personal obsessions of the noughties that you’d like to raise or any questions you’d like me to answer in my capacity as the decade’s splainer-in-chief, let me know and I’ll try to answer them before I take a break for Christmas…
Gimme, gimme more…
Help this is an anxiety dream. A journalist sent to interview Adele missed the email with the streaming link to her new album, then issued a grovelling on-air apology. Every part of this, from the original mistake to the public self-flagellation, is the stuff of my nightmares. It’s quite something though that Sony nixed the interview from being broadcast. The balance of power that Piers Morgan wanted to upset in the noughties (see Upskirt Chronicles issue 6) is now firmly back with the stars.
Remember when it seemed very important to decide whether Lana del Rey was or was not a big faker? I wrote about this for The Critic, but it’s really about the time when bloggers were music industry power brokers and how they reacted when that power started to slip. (An interesting point of connection between Adele and del Rey is that they both emerged at the right time to fill an Amy-Winehouse shaped hole in the culture: Adele provided big-voiced modern soul, and del Rey did the smoky chanteuse thing, and crucially neither of them looked like they were going to kill themselves in a quest to entertain.)
Please God spare me from the “doing a weird fetish scene of crawling under the bed when you’re 63 is empowering” Madonna discourse. Yeah she looks amazing, or at least uncanny, but (as a friend of mine said), what’s the endgame here: be a hot 80-year-old? Be a sexy corpse?
He also did this song off Paris Hilton’s album, which is an absolute bop:
There’s a possibility that there’s a much more prosaic explanation for her decision than my assumed psychodrama. But if so I would like to hear it, because that song would have killed if she’d recorded it.
Cry Me a River and Apologise are two of my favourite songs of this period! As for the sentiments behind them, they're worse than eighties soul singer's whining!