Let's anticipate Justin Timberlake's Man of the Woods...?

people thought Katy Perry was great?

i thought her halftime show was

she was pretty good but the shark made it

the show is always just as much about the spectacle as it is the performer tho so I include them all as a package deal

Katy was great. my memory is fuzzy but when she rode ... something? ... way up into the air singing Roar, I think? that was awesome!

^^^ lol i have an identical half-formed memory of that

xp maura I didn’t really notice how bad the vocals were, they sounded fine to me but there was some crosstalk at my watch party so maybe it warrants rescreening. everyone I watched with thought the choreography was solid tho, and I personally thought the song selection was on point. like UMS said above, I guess I just don’t know what people are looking for in a halftime show if that was bad

right, this is kind of the point of the halftime shows......?

oops that was an xp to this:

the show is always just as much about the spectacle as it is the performer tho so I include them all as a package deal

― Hi diddley dee, hen fapper's life for me (Neanderthal), Monday, February 5, 2018 2:28 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xxxp that nytimes piece was indeed probably written before the show, yet at the same time is pretty much otm. Especially when highlighting how Janet Jackson was vilified and JT can go about like nothing happened.

I do find it weird when people get rockist about a Super Bowl halftime show. I think the Black Eyed Peas one was the only recent one I considered completely terrible.

The Who were pretty bad

i watched with a music savvy crowd on a tv with a nice soundsystem
that said the “it’s supposed to be background noise” argument is a ... strange one? jt’s voice and the mixing itself was bad, and it was noticeable even in the context of the telecast

People generally like JT, he's had a lot of hits (both solo and with a group), he's a modest singer but a very good performer, and he's had decades of experience entertaining huge crowds. That he had all of that going for him and was still pretty indifferently received indicates something was not firing right, technical or otherwise. Not enough spectacle? Played it too safe? The fundamental thin-ness of pop without enough distractions (costumes, explosions, choreography)? Something like that. Doesn't help that as much as I like a lot of his stuff, very little JT is particularly exciting, let alone rousing. Probably why stuff like Mirrors and the Trolls song did so well. They're more conventionally anthemic, though that is probably too strong a word.

agree with all that ^ but everyone remember "we" exist in a bubble, no matter who you watched it with. 90% of norm women/kids absolutely loved it, 75% of norm men rolled their eyes and wanted "real" music and 25% of norm men did the whole "i can't believe i'm going to say this but i think the guy is very talented and seems like a cool dude" thing to contrast the eye-rollers.

the scores of millions of people who loved it aren't in yr twitter timeline

we had about 15 kids (12 and under) watching it and they were all like "this is weird / lame" "i dont like this who is this" and then 'cant stop the feeling' came on....

my 1 year old girl was rocking back and forth the whole time, my 3 year old boy paid no attention at all

I think y'all are on to something here

I tried to convince my 3 yr old to watch cuz "there are people dancing, you like people dancing" she was non-plussed and demanded we watch whatever she wanted to watch.

i watched with a music savvy crowd on a tv with a nice soundsystem
that said the “it’s supposed to be background noise” argument is a ... strange one? jt’s voice and the mixing itself was bad, and it was noticeable even in the context of the telecast

― maura, Monday, February 5, 2018 2:28 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Vocals sounded weird/bad to me but I was unclear if it was on purpose or a bad mix or what

Usually in these sorts of situations where I assume there are scads of professionals working on it when stuff sounds weird to me I just think its me and not that it's bad or mistake

What are you going to believe, your ears, or science?

I assume all terrible sounds are aesthetic choices

man of the woods title track is some looney tunes shit, what the f was he thinking

eheh, exactly !
Why not for a cartoon ost or something but on an album (and more so a supposedly "serious/spiritual/whatever" album)...

I got suppli-yiii-yiiiiieees

"supplies": because "Carry Out" wasn't bizarre and strained enough a metaphor

how many jt songs are extremely strained metaphors. i relistened to 20/20 the other week and as far as i can tell it's almost all of them

lol i forgot about "carry out"

i relistened to 20/20 the other week

congrats: if you can prove you finished it I'll nominate you for a Nobel.

da lex on j-tim.

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/is-justin-timberlake-losing-his-way-1.701958

what i wrote on lex FB. which is probably totally wrong but i kinda would have liked to see all-in faux-cowboy JT for some reason. i think it was that village people handkerchief that made me wish for it:

Scott Seward "if he really wanted to get woodsy he should have made a big pop-country album with huge nashville hitmakers handing him hooks for days and a smash duet with t-swift that premiered AT the halftime show. would have been the biggest seller of the year in the u.s."

i agree with you there. somewhere along the way whatever message he meant to come with got muddled.

"say something" isn't horrible; maybe shoulda just done an album of duets with Stapleton if he wanted to be in this lane?

i can't imagine Timberlake's voice over a country-ass country song

I have this feeling he just does not care that much anymore. There's some good songs in there, but even these good songs leave me with the impression another younger/hungrier artist would have made it better.

Perhaps he should go the Charli route and release mixtapes of shit he really cares about. This whole album with a concept thing just seem so heavy on him.

Also, christ, 16 songs. I know this is the streaming era, but please edit.

if i was ever a recording artist, i would release 8-song albums with 12 bonus tracks each with a 5 second sound effect from a synth preset just to goose the numbers

my big takeaway from watching him sing and dance in HD on a giant TV was: wow, Justin Timberlake is 37 years old

Tom Brady is 40.

Timberlake eats tomatoes, he won't make it to 40

probably wears sunscreen too

So I've tried to listen to more of this album.
the father/son stuff is awful, the husband/wife stuff is cringey, the looney tunes song is wtf, etc.
"Montana" which seems to be the favourite song for many people is just meh to me.
I think the only thing I enjoy is "Higher Higher". And the funky part from "Filthy" (minus some of the vocals)...
Good job JT !

lmao what the actual fuck is this

― algorithm is a dancer (katherine), Friday, 19 January 2018 05:44 (three weeks ago) Permalink

^^ otm