Justin Timberlake - The 20/20 Experience (2013, RCA Records)
Show You a Few Things
I’ve been spending all night trying to pinpoint exactly when my obsession with Justin Timberlake’s 2013 album The 20/20 Experience started. I haven’t been able to piece together a logical progression or a narrative tale, but I have this tweet about a “poll” to go off of as a starting place: https://twitter.com/Jorty_Spice/status/301126362171838464. During this period of my life I was really depressed and used the tried and true method of vomiting every thought, whether or not it was actually valuable or worth sharing, on social media to try to feel like I was expressing myself in a vulnerable way. I tend not to do that anymore, but it makes the 2012-2014 segment of my Twitter archive a fun time capsule. “Suit and Tie” dropped about a month before this tweet and, somehow, I vividly remember the bespoke poll taking place over the entire month. It took time to let “Suit and Tie” sink in. My extended college friend group was 17 (!!!) people strong, and we covered the spectrum of College Types: hipsters (W, C, B, me), ultimate frisbee players (J, L, White Scoops), arty weirdos (M), people that fuck and fuck each other (R, T), etc. Somehow, all of us became obsessed with “Suit and Tie,” to the point where it was the only thing we could play if any of the sundry friend sub-groups intersected. I couldn’t play My Bloody Valentine around R (I tried, he hated it), J couldn’t play any Griz around W (he was too self conscious to play music around the hipsters), but we could all agree that “Suit and Tie” fucking ripped.
Or could we? I’ve been trying to remember what this poll was actually about. The video didn’t come out until a few days later (again, immortalized in a tweet), so I’m assuming that our (probably J and me) method of conducting the poll was to get a person in a room and play “Suit and Tie” for them. I remember the question we ended up asking everyone: “Is this a good song?” The answer, even for the non-obsessed, is most likely a flat “sure, yeah,” but our question went deeper than that. The “good” in that sentence is a loaded one. We weren’t just asking if “Suit and Tie” was palatable, we wanted to know if it was objectively good. We were convinced that Justin Timberlake had created a work of art that transcended all preconceived notions of good and bad. We danced to it the day before the poll results dropped. R was an asshole so we forced him to listen to it over and over again. I think the results read as yes-undecided-no, and I’m guessing that Rob was the asshole in the middle who refused to decide if Justin Timberlake’s supposedly landmark smash hit was really the achievement in music I thought it was.
Eventually, R came around. I know he did, because within a week of the album’s leak and subsequent release, I listened to the album 67 times. I don’t think this is hyperbole. Have you ever found an hour-long album that 17 people can agree on? It’s magical. It’s an object to be cherished and experienced over and over again until it becomes so soaked into your bones that it’s an irrevocable part of you. But what’s the answer? Is it a good song? Is it an objectively good song?
Are You Comfortable?
R, J, A, and I (I as in the pronoun, not an initial) lived in a quad-style dormitory in Ole Miss’s Residential College.Our room was actually several rooms: four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a living room connecting all of them. The RC was a weird dorm - there was a cafeteria in the basement, showers in the rooms instead of communal ones per floor, and you had to apply to get in. It was also uniquely (for Ole Miss, at least) co-ed. The applications were approved by the residents currently living there, supposedly leading to a place where students feel truly welcomed by each other. The idea was that the residents that cohabitate the RC will already have things in common and want to grow from each other, leading to a more intellectually stimulating environment. The reality is that the first kids to get there were total fucking weirdos leading to future generations of denizens also being total fucking weirdos.
I have nothing against nerdy weirdos, seeing as I am one myself. I am a professional wrestling diehard who can pratte off years old Meltzer star ratings with embarrassing accuracy. The RC residents were a little overboard with their antisociality, even by my standards. This was the kind of dorm that needed a town hall meeting to stop people from screaming at each other during Magic: The Gathering games during tours. The guy that worked the desk graduated from college long ago and was hanging out to hit on younger girls. You get the idea.
The Quad became ground-zero for anyone who lived there who didn’t fit that mold. Shockingly, we were the minority in our dorm because we wanted to party. Nobody else on my floor wanted to mix water with Evan Williams in one of those giant plastic takeout cups you get from restaurants in the south and drink until 4 AM. The friend group was a mix of genders, something strictly outlawed by RC rules. The dorm was divided in half by gender and they must be separated by 10 PM. The RAs realized that we were devising new, unique ways to skirt this rule and stopped checkingThe Quad by Christmas. When R moved out and became a resident advisor we taped over the lock to his door and used it as a second living room/party room. At one point, White Scoops lived in that room for a full week without any of us realizing (through an intricate set of entry times and sleeping times) and dropped out of college shortly thereafter. It was a weird place.
Basically, I lived in a small party apartment in the middle of a nerd dorm. The friend group wasn’t really founded on common interests or similar personalities; there was an intangible, distinctly collegiate bond formed between disparate people who realize they need to rely on each other to stay sane in a bizarrely inhospitable situation. A lot of that situation was probably more in our own heads than an actual real struggle of us vs. The Bad Nerds, but it felt like our 20 year old backs were against the wall.
What that amounted to was drinking a fucking lot of PBR and Evan Williams. We would sit in circles, play Munchkin (pot kettle black, I know) or that one drinking game involving a deck of playing cards that everyone on Earth seems to have a different name for and drink for hours, like the sort of professional drinking (and drinking gaming) you can only do when you’re below the legal drinking age. There was very little we could actually agree on until “Suit and Tie” came out. Justin Timberlake’s music even got girls to finally talk to me about my record collection, something I had been dreaming about for a long time. Inevitably, if you visited The Quad, you were subjected to The 20/20 Experience and the subsequent discussion about whether music peaked.
Let Me Get a Good Look At It
I’m going to approach this a little anachronistically. The downside to drinking Evan and Water (the Marty, as I am now choosing to call it) is that I don’t actually remember a lot of that year of my life, or really any subsequent years of my life until about 2017. I have impressionistic snatches of it and, shockingly, most of them are either related to girls I unsuccessfully tried to kiss or listening to Justin Timberlake. Oh, also that time J made fun of me for really trying to make “noided” a thing among non-Death Grips fans. Here’s a 3:04 AM drunk tweet about “I’ve Seen Footage.” This is a form of radical vulnerability.
When I say “anachronistically,” I mean that I really can’t remember exactly why “Suit and Tie” gripped me. I have feelings about it in the context of the entire album, but as a disconnected song I’m kind of at a loss. It’s definitely a good song, but I don’t know I’d go so far to say it’s a great one. The syrupy, downtuned Stax horns are a great touch, as is the radar ping percussive sound. There’s a lot of great contrasts in this song - the pitched down horns show back up later in unaltered form, the old school cool feeling (down to the name of the song) is played well against the signature Timbaland production techniques and the extremely 2013 Jay-Z verse. Sadly, I can’t remember exactly why it gripped me as much as it did. The song glides along effortlessly for four minutes and ten seconds until it glides directly into a wall. Questlove famously (to me) called the slowed down beat a “pander move” and it’s hard to disagree. Once you think about it too hard, you notice a lot of cracks in the song. “So thick/now I know why they call it a fatty?” What the fuck is that? Why does he say “daddy” like he’s embarrassed that he’s into it? And did Jay-Z even need to be on this track at all?
The answer to all of these questions, and most questions I keep coming back to on this album, is that I don’t know how, but it all works. The style is substance for The 20/20 Experience.
If My Red Eyes Can’t See You Anymore
I had a very formative weed summer a few months after this album came out. Marijuana is an incredibly overrated drug (as are all drugs, including alcohol (including the Marty)) but when you’re a stoner-in-training, the feeling of taking a an enormous hit out of a Powerade bottle gravity bong, laying under a blanket, and listening to a good album is absolutely unparalleled.
It’s like listening to music with an entirely new set of ears. The 20/20 Experience sounded immense while stoned. It sounded like I was invited to a party on a different planet, zooming from station to station with Justin Timberlake in a wigged out, reflective rocketship. That’s the kind of dumb shit you think of when you’re stoned and refuse to cut your hair (even when your job putting advertisements in public bathrooms asks you to) but it does get at the heart of why The 20/20 Experience and the Justin Timberlake/Timbaland partnership as a whole works: it feels like music an alien would make. I don’t mean like a cool alien, like a Prince or David Bowie. I mean a straight, white, alien from Tennessee who does not have a bone of actual funk in his body. “SexyBack,” the most popular of their efforts, doesn’t actually sound sexy at all. It sounds like someone described the idea of pornography to him and he did his best job musically approximating his knee-jerk reaction to it. I got this same vibe from watching his appearance on the hit YouTube show Hot Ones. He’s a handsome man, sure, but nothing about him is sexy or even remotely human.
Consequently, nothing about The 20/20 Experience is really substantial. It just feels like it is. It’s a bizarre point to make about an album that I ostensibly like, but it was something else I noticed while I was high out of my mind and listening to “Suit and Tie.” It’s dense. The weed seemed to detach the low pitched rambling (scatting? harmonizing?) during the choruses and it felt like I was noticing a new element of a song I had listened to at least 67 times before. Was it always there? Was I always processing it’s existence and had it been affecting my enjoyment of the song? Did other people notice it? Those questions are interesting, but the real question was simple: does it matter? Even as I’m writing this, I’m noticing new elements of deep cut “Don’t Hold The Wall” - specifically the bassy humming in the intro. The other night while driving around to the album I got hyper zoned in on the fucking shaker in that song. But does any of it mean anything? Are the songs actually about anything? Or do they make me just feel like they’re about something?
To borrow a mix of stoner and hipster metaphors, if FutureSex/LoveSounds is pop’s Kid A, The 20/20 Experience is it’s Loveless: a dense monolith of marbled sound that has a sculpture lying underneath if you chip away at it for long enough.
Ephemera: Suit and Oblivion
I’m lucky enough (for reasons that I’m not sure I can get into) own a clean, pristine digital MP3 of the instrumental to Grimes’ “Oblivion.” At some point I made a very cursed mash-up of it and “Suit and Tie.” You can listen to it here.
I Can’t Hear You Through The White Noise
My first exposure to The 20/20 Experience as an album actually came from the 2013 Grammys. The show aired on February 10, a few days before the absolutely gorgeous David Fincher directed music video was released and just one day before the fabled poll results rolled in. I can’t remember if my friends and I watched the show live or if we just streamed the video after the fact, but considering we were probably the biggest Justin Timberlake fans in the world at this point, I assume the we actually went and bought a coax cable and used the RC’s limited cable access to watch CBS on a Sunday. Even today, this performance still floors me. It feels electric. The full band arrangement brings new life to “Suit and Tie,” the live band sounds tight, Timberlake’s vocals have just enough edge to make him feel like he’s actually fronting a soul band displaced from time, and when he says “get out your seat, Hov” Jay-Z literally gets out of his fucking seat to rap his verse. It’s awesome. That image has been lodged in the folds of my brain for years.
What’s more revealing is the second half of the performance: the network TV debut of “Pusher Love Girl,” The 20/20 Experience’s opening track. I can’t remember exactly how I felt about it at the time (again, anachronistic view of this album due to copious cheap whiskey consumption) but there’s an obvious distinction here between this performance and the album version. The Grammys version of “Pusher Love Girl” clocks in at just under four minutes, a perfect pop song length for a great pop tune. The album version is slightly over eight minutes long.
It’s impossible to talk about The 20/20 Experience without mentioning the aesthetic challenge of just reading the track times. It begins with an 8:02 and ends with a 7:19. Neither are the longest song on the album - that honor actually goes to his second most streamed song on Spotify (and top streamed song from an actual album), “Mirrors,” which runs a svelte eight minutes and four seconds. Timberlake is no stranger to long songs; FutureSex/LoveSounds features three songs clocking over seven minutes long, but all of them are designated in the tracklist as multiple songs stitched together in a medley. That’s not how The 20/20 Experience is structured. The first part of “Pusher Love Girl” is the hit, the back portion is a dubby, fuzzed out three vamp on a simple riff. It’s one idea pushed to its logical extreme.
That song structure idea comes up multiple times on The 20/20 Experience: “Strawberry Bubblegum'' shifts from spacey, borderline ambient neo-soul to bossa nova, “Don’t Hold The Wall” cribs Boiler Room style beats, and JT even gets his own Kanye “Runaway” vocoder moment (sort of) at the end of “Mirrors.” “Mirrors' ' actually has a 4:27 radio edit that cuts out the vocoder bits and ends the song right before the coda begins. I think the decision there, and the decision to not play the end of “Pusher Love Girl,” is sort of fascinating. It makes sense in a commercial way, clearly, as no one in their right mind would play all eight minutes of any pop single on iHeartMedia owned terrestrial radio stations, but it almost feels like a fun bait and switch. There is real artistry in the active choice to make a majority of the songs on your pop album, including an obvious smash hit, distinctly un-pop lengths. It lulls the listener into a false sense of security. Looking at the track length for “Pusher Love Girl” and having absolutely no context for what the last few minutes of the song could possibly contain is a true joy that just doesn’t exist in the run-of-the mill pop album.
Let The Groove Get In You
Here are a few moments that still impress me when I listen to the album eight years on:
The beat switch on “Strawberry Bubblegum.” That bar of wakka-wakka guitar bridging the ethereal neo-soul half with the funky bossa nova half is a genius move that someone else should copy.
Whatever that layered bass drum sound is towards the end of the pseudo-jam on “Let the Groove Get In.” Shit’s punchy.
“Blue Ocean Floor” climaxing with a slower version of the same strings that open the album.
Actually, “Blue Ocean Floor” as a whole.The backwards piano? The overlapping vocals? That clunking, sizzling, almost Burial-style percussion that takes up the space where actual drums would normally be? I can’t believe this song is on a pop album.
The beat-switch on “Tunnel Vision” more or less being replaced by the most egregious Timbaland beatboxing ever recorded. I don’t know if it was the smartest call on the album, but I do enjoy it.
There's a lack of JT on the end of “Don’t Hold the Wall.” The human element gets fulfilled by the borderline-nonsensical “you shouldn’t have to ask me that question” sample, but either way it’s a bold choice.
And that’s just the stuff that impresses me, not everything I like. What’s notable is that almost all of them occur during the back half of the songs. The stretched out outros are the draw for me on almost every single song. They were an essential part of the friend-group crossover aspect of the album; everyone liked the hooks, but the hipsters really dug into the more abstract codas. It’s also just substance-free enough to be malleable and listenable in just about every situation: a close listen is rewarded by the depth of sound, but throwing it on the background of a party means just about everyone has an agreeable soundtrack to groove to. It’s not the first album to try to marry pop sensibilities with artier, more intentional production, but it’s the first of it’s kind to truly hook me like it did.
Ephemera: The Tennessee Kid
I saw JT live once in early 2019 on the “Man of the Woods'' tour. I took my mom as part of her Christmas gift. “Man of the Woods,” is a deeply, uniquely terrible album but the live show was incredible. He had this bizarre, elongated stage that ran the entire length of the basketball court at the FedEx Forum. He projected a hologram of a camping scene on it at one point, which prompted him and his bandmates to pantomime a campfire singalong. During “Mirrors,” an army of projection screens descended from the ceiling and displayed enormously surreal reflections of JT performing. The sheer amount of planning and cardio that went into the performance was impressive, to say nothing of how well the music translated in a live context.
What’s stuck with me for a few years now is JT’s insistence on calling Memphis “M-Town.” Not just “M-Town,” but “emmmmmm towwwwwwwwn.” He said this an uncountable amount of times during his performance. No one has ever called Memphis “M-Town.” Never. JT would know that if he grew up here, but he did not. Yes, that one fact you may have known about Justin Timberlake has been wrong all along. JT did not, infact, grow up in Memphis, Tennessee. This man was born and (partially) raised in Millington, Tennessee. You ever heard of Millington? No? Me neither, until I moved here and people told me that Justin Timberlake was from Millington. It’s a rural suburb of Memphis. There’s not much there besides chain restaurants, my girlfriend’s sister’s house (nice place), and trees. I honestly don’t blame Justin for adopting Memphis and making it a part of his mythology. There’s nothing sexy about saying you’re from Millington, Tennessee. Actually, there’s nothing sexy about claiming to be from Memphis either, but you might think that if you’re far removed from the concept and substance of what being sexy really means.
Break You Down
I have a tendency to overanalyze things that I love. Big shocker, I know. I think dissecting a work of art and actively thinking about it is the highest compliment you can pay to it. I only want to ruminate on the things I really love or fascinate me, even if those ruminations end with me exposing certain flaws in the work that I may have otherwise glossed over during normal consumption. I think this spills over into a new sixth love language that I am currently pioneering: engaging with my complete overanalysis of otherwise mundane art. My girlfriend regularly does this with me while watching AEW Dynamite each week, and it makes me fall deeper in love with her every time she does it.
Our Timberlake-based numbers crunch didn’t just end at a poll. We wanted to power rank the entire album. I remember calling this a “scientifically objective” way of looking at an album. The idea was simple: each song gets an amount of points based on where you rank it and then the songs are ordered based on the average. I called the results polarizing. The power rank was completed on March 19, a scant four days after the album’s release. I’m a little shocked about that, honestly. The first time I tweeted about the album was a week prior, on March 12. I would’ve been listening to the leak at that point. I was in Gulf Shores when the leak dropped. I had enough time to listen to it, sure, but was a week enough time for a full friend group to power rank the album? Would it be too soon to see the results?
Accurate or not, the results of our ranking are not polarizing at all (that one’s an image, just in case you got tired of clicking on old tweets of mine). Based on some quick math, the polling pool was limited to just seven people, which is probably not totally scientifically accurate. I get the feeling that it’s the only study done of its kind, so we can call it scientificish. “Pusher Love Girl” winning top honors isn’t shocking at all, it’s the perfect mix of this album’s distinct blend of crowd pleasing pop and boundary pushing song structure. Same goes for “Strawberry Bubblegum.” The one thing I remember about my vote in this is that I put “Tunnel Vision'' up top, which seems like a weird move now. It’s great, sure, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s one of the songs on the album without a beat switch that would have greatly benefited from one. The only shocker in the rankings to Present Day Me is “Mirrors” dead last. It’s not the best song on the album, but through hearing it at various Walgreens and Targets over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate it a lot.
Seeing these power rankings from over 8 years ago made me realize two things: 1) my taste has changed greatly over time and 2) I think I need to power rank it again. Taste is fleeting and, in the grand scheme of viewing how art has impacted my life, isn’t really what’s important. The memories and the feeling imparted on me by diving deep into this ambitiously weird pop album are what really matters. I am a constantly changing, constantly evolving human being who is informed by past experiences. Not even memories are accurate, but the impressions are long lasting.
That being said, let’s re-rank the songs from The 20/20 Experience.
Blue Ocean Floor - I think C was the only one to have this at #1 in the original rankings.
He got a lot of shit for it, but he’s right. This is the emotional climax of the album and the one song with actual, real substance. It’s bold. The lack of real percussion takes the pop lens away from the song and focuses it squarely in a more experimental light. It’s the most human this weird, sexless alien has ever felt and I think he did it without even trying.Don’t Hold The Wall - This one is a shocker, even to me. The front half is kind of nothing, the second half is one of the best showcases of Timbaland’s production skills ever committed to tape. The “you shouldn’t have to ask me that question” sample puts it over the top.
Strawberry Bubblegum - The switch to funky bossa nova is both unearned and a high watermark for the concept of the beat switch in pop music. This song sounds like what I assume floating 6 inches above the ground would feel like.
Tunnel Vision - I gave it some shit above, but I still love this one. The skittering percussion is a highlight on an album with great drums all the way through. Huge props to the ascending vocal melody in the pre-chorus, especially when another JT comes in to layer the adlibs over it. I don’t know if I hit this topic enough here, but the vocal layering on this entire album is gorgeous.
Pusher Love Girl - As an introduction to an album concept, this is unbeatable. As a song on it’s own, it’s a little long. I tried showing this to my girlfriend and her first response was “what the fuck is a pusher love girl?” which is fair.
Mirrors - The beatboxing. It’s so good. I really love how it deconstructs itself at the end, setting you up for the final catharsis in “Blue Ocean Floor.” It’s all a comedown before the inevitable crash and hangover.
Let The Groove Get In - I saw someone on RateYourMusic compare this to “I Zimbra.” It’s not totally inaccurate.
Suit and Tie - The definition of stupid fun.
That Girl - I want to like this more because I think the horns are great but it’s extremely cheesy.
Spaceship Coupe - From the top down, this is a fucking stupid song. The concept is stupid, the vocal samples at the end that I guess are supposed to replicate what it would be like to have sex in Justin Timberlake’s spaceship are stupid, and the guitar solo is stupid in a good way. I still like it, but it’s fucking dumb.
Make It Pop
There’s an old Chuck Klosterman adage that says that all art criticism is inherently autobiographical. What a critic says about an album tends to reveal more about the critic themselves than any quality intrinsic to the album. If this is true (and it is) then what does my obsession and deep love for The 20/.20 Experience say about me? There’s no point in using this space to convince you, the reader, that Justin Timberlake is secretly good or some other cliche. That’s already accepted knowledge, dude has been a Pitchfork Approved Pop Artist since FutureSex/LoveSounds was released. His stock has dropped in recent years, sure, but for a brief, fleeting moment in time, JT had a foot in both the pop and alternative worlds.
I think the adoration for an oft-forgotten pop album says a lot about the power I believe music holds and the reverence that I give said power. Do I think the album holds up after eight years? Kind of. Mostly. But that’s not really the point. The 20/20 Experience was something that I internalized as a part of my (and my friend group at large) identity. It was our album. It was the only album we could all readily identify with and love wholeheartedly. I have a deep, defining need to understand the world and be understood within it. It’s the reason I love music so much; art is a shorthand way for me to express the things I find beautiful and meaningful in the world. That is at its most interesting and valuable when removed from its vacuum of solo headphone listening and placed in the reality of social engagement. The 20/20 Experience was the link between me and all of these contrasting kinds of people. It was a conduit for a shared experience that went deeper than just drinking cheap whiskey in dorm rooms. It was about the love and connection we shared. That’s what this album reminds me of, and that’s what I will always carry forward with me.
For all the shit I can and do give myself for my social media usage, I’m glad that 20 year old me’s instability and need to broadcast his thoughts in an unrelatable, microblogging format eventually paid off. I chose to use the tweets because they’re a crystalized form of memory. Memory is an inherently faulty thing that’s shaded by the past and present simultaneously. Tweets are true forever. The key takeaway is somewhere in between the reality and narrative that I’ve created for myself surrounding my love for this album. It felt bigger than it really was, like an all-consuming black void inside me that swallowed everyone else into it. In reality, I think I was just really excited about an unabashedly strange pop album and wanted to take my friends along for the ride. I know they loved it too, but it somehow still feels very singular to me.
That’s also what’s bittersweet about this. I haven’t really spoken to any of these people in any real capacity in years. I’ve had falling outs with some, drifted apart from others, and just wasn’t that great of friends to begin with with a few of them. The album defined our bond, but all I have left is the memories of the intense, burning connection I had with these people for a brief amount of time. It feels like an echo sometimes. My memories of those times are viewed through a lens of both sentimentality and heartbreak. Am I sad that I don’t have a tangible connection to this time in my life anymore? To an extent, yes. More often than not, I’m awed by the sheer power and intensity of those memories, rather than disheartened by the inability to make new ones. I’ve moved on and am a much happier person than I was in 2013. Listening to The 20/20 Experience always brings a huge smile to my face because it reminds me that I can choose what I decide to internalize and carry with me as I go on through life. It’s a weird lesson to learn from a Justin Timberlake album, sure, but the shared weirdness of the human existence is what pop music is all about anyway.
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