When Justin Timberlake isn’t busy method acting, taking his role as online music mogul Sean ‘Napster’ Parker just a little too seriously and performing necromancy on dead social networks, he makes music, apparently. Who knew?
It’s been seven years since JT came out with the juggernaut album Futuresex/Lovesound, that’s the amount of time Twitter has been around.
I was 14 years old and dancing manically to JT bringing sexy back without letting us know where it went in the first place. Futuresex was a guaranteed hitmaking floor-filler, perfectly ingrained in its time. If we want to start defining the sound of the Noughties, it’s an early call, but I’d probably start there.
Fast-forward seven years. I’m nearly 21 and JT has an acting/entrepreneurial career, which he is surprisingly good at. He’s decided to head back into music territory with The 20/20 Experience, opening our eyes to world of music made apparently clearer by his presence.
But for an album that promises the 20/20 experience, it feels a little cloudy. It’s classy from the beginning, a smoky budoir with smooth, old school RnB and hip-hop breakdowns that really resemble scatting. This is RnB pop injected with big band class, old and classic and thoroughly JT. It is, at times, sweet blend of chilled out funk and RnB.
It’s certainly a more mature effort than Futuresex, JT showing off over two decades of slickly produced experience. But like many things more mature including grandparents, history documentaries, and taking the high road, this album is snoreworthy. Yes, it is pretty damn boring.
This is purely a lounge album. Each track meanders with no real light and shade and very little variety throughout. There are some surprising bossa nova breakdowns, and Latin and Bollywood influences that lend a richer sound, but this is hardly a daring album.
Most songs sit at a laborious eight minutes and never soar, or even get their flabby bodies off the ground. This is JT’s midlife. This is him settling down. The songs on this album are loving, sweet, passionate. There’s nothing challenging or edgy here.
What we can see 20/20 is that JT is going through his Beyonce stage. These late 90s and early noughties pop stars are older, settling down, getting married and having babies and they’re making music that kind of fits with their life stage. JT’s marriage last year to actress Jessica Biel is definitely leaking into his music, giving him a more adult and genuine, but far less exciting sound.
Justin doesn’t want to get up and dance with club rats any more. He doesn’t really feel like bringing sexy back. He just wants to lie on his Italian chaise lounge with his wife and a classy movie. The problem is that we still crave Justin’s musical dynamism that is dwindling a bit with age.
The current single Mirrors is pure pop. It’s somewhat catchy, but overall bland and uninspired. Similarly, the first single Suit and Tie didn’t offer much more in terms of musicality than a broken record. Let the Groove Get In is a floor-filler with some infectious groove, but it’s a shame the rest of the album isn’t so balanced.
Blue Ocean Floor is the stand-out track here. It’s the only track that shows that JT is paying attention to the current wave. It’s really chilled, atmospheric soul that is blissful background listening but sadly hammers the nail in JT’s adult contemporary coffin.
If you want a somewhat depressing reminder that the musicians we loved as kids are now middle-aged and boring, you might want to check out The 20/20 Experience. You may see more clearly that everything is cyclical, and even pop stars get old.
I personally can’t wait until JT’s midlife crisis. Someone needs to bring sexy back.
-Nat Tencic
