Break Up With Justin Timberlake

By Chris Revelle | Celebrity | October 25, 2023 |

By Chris Revelle | Celebrity | October 25, 2023 |

Finding truisms in the entertainment industry can be a dicey proposition. There are relatively very few true universals or certainties in this world aside from death, taxes, and the ageless vampire prince Paul Rudd. There is one I’ve long held to be true, and now that Britney Spears has released a memoir that details, among other things, how Justin Timberlake was one of many ghouls only too happy to use her for their gain, I will share it here: we over-validated Justin Timberlake and we, like Spears, need to break up with him.

Timberlake is not the first medium-talented white man to get 3 tons of praise for 3 ounces of creativity, and sadly, he probably won’t be the last. Timberlake had put out 4 solo albums by 2013 when he was showered with the word “icon” and given the MTV Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award, and his solo career comprises just 5 releases. Considering that most of his output is concerned with retreading tracks from FutureSex/LoveSounds, calling him anything but a hack feels too kind. And this is coming from someone who liked that album! Artists are meant to evolve and seeing someone reduce their music to a series of proven formulas that will make money doesn’t exactly inspire admiration. Timberlake compared his work to David Byrne and David Bowie, which are both inexplicable and incorrect. He threw Janet Jackson under the bus, tanking an actual icon’s career to further his own. He threw Spears under the bus too, urging her to get an abortion before he dumped her and rode gross insinuations about her to fame, fortune, and uncritical fans. Timberlake is a middling actor and a decidedly un-gifted comedian who relies on Andy Samberg to be funny and to launder jokes about having sex with Britney. It’s almost like he couldn’t think of a path to success that didn’t depend on putting female artists down or something, huh?

So beyond the usual reasons we worship mediocre white men, why did we prop Timberlake up for so long? Like Game of Thrones, Timberlake was ubiquitous in his heyday but not talked of much since he bowed out, a sign that perhaps his music was ultimately neither that memorable nor that influential. While there are multiple factors that allowed Timberlake to succeed, I would like to suggest another contributor: Timberlake told people what they wanted to hear in the early 2000s; that Britney Spears is an evil sex-having minx who cheated on him, the supposed golden boy, and the culture paid him back for validating the disgusting and insane mind-fuck dog-piling the media was engaging in with Spears. That he seemingly was the cheater himself, among other sins, only further proves his shittiness. Beyond any opinions about her music, people at the time demanded she fall apart in front of our eyes for our entertainment and then here comes the NSYNC guy telling us how right we were to despise her. From Cry Me A River to the SNL skit (linked above) and beyond, Timberlake capitalized on the misogyny already raining down on Spears.

Timberlake will almost certainly try to assuage or mollify the stories Spears relays in The Woman Inside Me and it will probably involve a good deal of revisionist history. He’s already, allegedly, trying to smoothly move past it and wait for it to blow over. The man shanked both Spears and Jackson to get ahead and we shouldn’t forget. If you haven’t done it already, it’s time to break up with Justin Timberlake. He sucks.