It’s hardly news that being a corporate pop culture product is taxing for anyone not to mention a performer. Paris has no talent and even she must find it difficult to get by on a day to day level (at least when she’s run out of Xanax) let alone an actual performer who has to balance out their needy sensitive ego with a tendency toward megalomania and narcissism. After all, Britney Spears’ meltdown occurred almost entirely because she really just couldn’t hold in the humanity any more and she cracked.
That’s why it’s interesting that Justin Timberlake has been lashing out a bit lately. Maybe he’s not letting it all out the right way. The trouble is, unlike the quality meltdown from Britney, it’s all so petulant and considered – because, with someone like Justin Timberlake, very little isn’t.
Timberlake has spent a lot of time appropriating black hip hop culture because it’s probably the only thing that will wash away the Teflon squeak of his boy band past and let him actually keep performing without descending into a bottomless pit of generic irrelevance. In line with this, he’s written a new track with Fitty Cent which is all about secretly watching girls naked.
This new, specific and quite adolescent reference to pornography is two things.
One, as a part of his ongoing campaign to wash away the paradoxically squeaky clean dirt of his past it’s a conscious effort toward being see as edgy.
Two, it’s about mobilizing women to consider themselves his sex object so he gets to do that passive sexuality thing. He sings about watching porn and spying desperately on women and that imbibes him with sexual energy and appeal but he’s not parading himself around as the actual sex object. So, he’s still safe for the flyover states and will probably rake in a nation worth of babysitting money as soon as it comes out.
That’s how America likes its mainstream to be; insistently dripping with sex but nothing you couldn’t turn a blind eye to when a 12 year old girl plays it on her ipod.
What really sucks about this is the inane title they originally gave it. 'Ayo Technology'? And apparently, they wanted to say 'Ayo Pornography'. Wow, totally got it. Yeah. Deep. So, now it’s going to be called “She Wants It”. Cool, just like the basis for a defense argument in a date rape trial. Edgy. [source]
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