Justin Timberlake performs onstage during the 2018 iHeartRadio Music Festival at T-Mobile Arena on Sept. 22, 2018, in Las Vegas. His latest album, “Everything I Thought It Was,” came out Friday. But one in which he frames the pain he’s endured as a byproduct of his devotion to his Tennessee hometown? That’s truly unhinged.
It’s also a baffling aesthetic approach: By rooting his struggles in his connection to an African American cultural capital — “I was way too far out in the world, but I still put on for my city,” he insists in his well-practiced blaccent — Timberlake is flaunting his proximity to Blackness at a moment when pop seems to have little of the use it once did for white guys doing R&B.
None of this is to doubt Timberlake’s genuine love of R&B nor to diminish his undeniable skill for making it: Though it’s larded with glib disco-funk tracks and morose, One Republic-style pop-rock tunes, “Everything I Thought It Was” contains a handful of gems in “Love & War,” a Prince-ish ballad with his prettiest falsetto singing, and the spacey slow jam “What Lovers Do”; “Selfish,” the album’s coolly received lead single, is another highlight, this one with echoes of Bieber’s...
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