'FutureSex/LoveSounds' | Every Single Album: Justin Timberlake

Key takeaways

• In 2006 and 2007, Timberlake briefly felt like the biggest star alive: three number-one singles ("SexyBack," "My Love," "What Goes Around... Comes Around"), Scarlett Johansson in his videos, "Dick in a Box" on SNL, and Oscar buzz ahead. Hubbard argues he was the last pre-smartphone superstar, with almost no fan-shot archival footage, which helps explain why many current 20-somethings barely think of him as a star beyond the Trolls song.
• The album is a producer's showcase built around Timbaland and will.i.am, with Rick Rubin on the closer. Lyrics were largely improvised and often corny ("when you cheated girl, my heart bleated girl"; "just a classic case, a scenario"), yet the songs land because Timberlake is an A-level singer, dancer, and showman who can sell material almost no one else could, such as the phrase "I'm bringing sexy back."
• Both hosts call the record undeniably appropriative but note Timberlake came by the sound partly honestly, a Memphis kid who made early bets on the Neptunes and Timbaland when pop was still Max Martin's Eurocentric zone. Their frustration is that he has never given the one interview showing he understands he borrowed rather than invented. The guest list (Three 6 Mafia, T.I., Snoop, Missy Elliott, Beyoncé, 50 Cent) reads to them as a peer cosign.
• "What Goes Around... Comes Around" gets extended treatment as the album's best song and, in Nora's phrase, "the most Justin Timberlake has ever Justin Timberlaked." It was widely misread as a shot at Britney Spears during her public unraveling; those involved say it was written from a cheated-on friend's perspective. Whether it beats "Cry Me a River" is teased repeatedly and never settled.
• Structurally the album overreaches: more than an hour long, songs fused with slashes and hashes, several running six or seven minutes. The front half through "Summer Love" is strong, then it collapses into "Chop Me Up," "Damn Girl," and "Losing My Way," the meth-addiction song that opens "Hi, my name is Bob and I work at my job" and later adds a choir. The hosts suspect those misses cost it Album of the Year, which went to the Dixie Chicks in a stacked field.
• Timberlake has skipped a Vegas residency and a greatest-hits run, kept his family life private, and stepped back from chasing attention. The hosts think a reappraisal is likelier to come through a strong film role, possibly a Magnolia-style turn, than through new music, and that one good interview plus a hits show could shift how younger listeners see him.

Notable moments

• Hubbard on the 2006 concert: "he was main character, Nora," describing arena energy he says he has never felt before or since.
• Hubbard's Four Seasons bar story: Britney Spears wandering a crowded weekday happy hour in a near ankle-length pink wig, pretending to look for someone, "one of the saddest things I've ever seen with my eyes."
• Timberlake's promo run resurfaced: "music needs an enema" in Dazed, the "sad state of pop music" in Rolling Stone, and "I aspire to get people's asses off the walls."
• The recurring "evolution of man" image, with Timberlake passing the baton to Bieber and then to Harry Styles as the reigning male pop star.
• Nora's Gossip Girl tangent, with "What Goes Around" scoring the pilot and Lily van der Woodsen's line "I don't care if it's a Murakami, it clashes with my sofa."
• The Bieber and Hailey "W Youth" cover Q&A, roughly 45 words total, answers including "golf," "Christmas," and "The Bible."
• Final grades: Hubbard offers "WTF," Nora lands on an A-minus, and both compare the hits-plus-filler split to Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream"; Nora closes by noting Taylor Swift's debut arrived less than two months later.

Time saved: 1 hour, 6 minutes.