Justin Timberlake and the Young Fame Effect
If we’re asking for more “maturity” in his work, should we not first reckon with his maturity, period?
Dear Squawkers,
Beyoncé has just secured her eighth #1 album on the Billboard 200, her biggest album in nearly a decade, and this is happening as she gets deeper into her 40s. Justin Timberlake, meanwhile, who was born the same year, released his latest album, Everything I Thought It Was (EITIW), a few weeks before and… well… the results weren’t the same. But Justin isn’t just contending with Beyoncé – so many pop girlies are dropping new music: Ariana Grande, Kacey Musgraves, Tyla, Dua Lipa, and more; and of course, with the imminent earthquake that will be Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, there simply just hasn’t been room for Justin. Or, maybe, it’s that the culture doesn’t want to make room for him.
On the recent Justin Timberlake episode of The New York Times’s Popcast, hosted by Jon Caramanica, there was a conversation about male popstars, and how much space there is, not just now, but historically, in pop culture for pop kings – how many of them are we able to entertain at once? While the audience seems to be able to elevate and support multiple pop queens simultaneously, Popcast meditated on whether or not there might only be one crown to be claimed for all the boys in the game. And if that’s the case, it’s not sitting on JT’s head. It did, of course, for a stretch there in the 2000s when he was in his 20s, but now, as he enters middle age, he has not been able to reclaim the throne.
This is ironic to me. Because the more common narrative about fame and success and aging is that women are the ones whose opportunities are limited as they get older. And here we find Justin Timberlake, a 40+ year old male artist who has been perceived to have catapulted his career off the shoulders of female artists, in a position of staring down irrelevance – not just because of the lack of heat around this current album but also in succession after the flop that was his previous album, Man of the Woods.
Interestingly, at least to me, Man of the Woods came out in 2018, when JT was 37 years old. Janet Jackson was 37 when she performed with him at the Super Bowl. Karma or coincidence?
Believe it or not, though, the main point of this newsletter isn’t to dump on Justin Timberlake. In fairness to him, I actually want to expand the discourse about him. Because I don’t think we talk enough about the effect that early fame has had on him.
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