You could almost feel sorry for Justin Timberlake, attempting a return after being reappraised as the villain in two massive pop miscarriages of justice. His career endured after the 2004 Super Bowl – during which he ripped off Janet Jackson’s clothing – while she was censured. But the cultural misogyny of that moment is now self-evident, as it is in the treatment of Britney Spears after their 2002 breakup, when she was painted as unfaithful and subject to disgustingly invasive scrutiny. Her 2023 memoir told a different story, in which she claimed Timberlake cheated and pressured her to abort a pregnancy. She wrote that she had to have a home procedure to avoid being spotted at hospital, and cried in pain on the bathroom floor while Timberlake strummed his acoustic guitar to try and soothe her. (In 2021, he apologised to both women.) Throw in his last album, 2018’s diabolical back-to-the-land reverie Man of the Woods, and you’ve got fairly unprecedented levels of pop pariahdom. Everything I Thought It Was seems less like a straightforward comeback than a survival mission.
Timberlake appears to recognise that he’s on the back foot: tellingly, he has given no interviews, save soft-touch TV bits, though he briefly came out swinging in February. After Spears apologised for offending anyone “I genuinely care about” with her memoir, and praised Timberlake’s mournfully horny comeback single, Selfish, he told a crowd: “I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to absolutely fucking nobody.” In an era when contrition and growth are pop-star lingua franca, the idea of a proper heel turn was quite exciting.
