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In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
It’s February 2017 — Oscar night, baby! The glitz! The glamor! Hollywood is out, all dressed up, celebrating its own! In a few hours, the world will get to watch one of the all-time great live-TV fuckups when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway accidentally hand the Best Picture award to the wrong picture and one poor La La Land producer has to scurry to the mic to announce that Moonlight is the actual winner. For now, though, the machine is working the way it’s supposed to work. The night is supposed to start with Justin Timberlake, flanked by his phalanx of dancers, singing to us about how he’s got this feeling inside his bones that goes electric wavy when he turns it on.
Justin Timberlake is here to kick the Oscars off because Justin Timberlake is the entertainment business personified. He blew into the cultural imagination on the TRL boy-band wave, made the transition into grown-up solo stardom, won critics’ respect, jumped over to movies, and showed up in a few great ones. He remained relevant even as he cruised to dad status. In 2017, Timberlake seems like a veteran song-and-dance man, and his amiable bubble-disco movie-cartoon song is nominated for an Oscar that night, so why wouldn’t he perform? The stars — Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Taraji P. Henson, Emma Stone, Jackie Chan — get up out of their seats and dance. They can’t stop the feeling, either.
Up onstage in front of everyone at the Dolby Theatre, Timberlake eases into former Number Ones artist Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day,” the song that supposedly influenced his cartoon-movie smash in the first place. (“Lovely Day” peaked at #30 in 1978.) The moment of the switch, Timberlake looks down into the front row, makes eye contact, and says, “I know you know this one, Denzel!” This immediately gets me wondering: Are Justin Timberlake and Denzel Washington… friends? Or is this merely the most famous aging Black person in the room? Does Timberlake do the mental calculation that he’ll look cool if he acts like he’s friends with Denzel Washington? Timberlake then dances his way into the front row and high-fives Washington, and I’m not enough of a body-language student to tell whether Denzel is actually grinning or gritting his teeth.
Watching live, that moment just jumped out to me — one little Timberlake thing that didn’t feel quite right. It happens every once in a while, even with the coolest and most polished celebrities. One moment like that isn’t going to affect public perception of a figure as bulletproof as Justin Timberlake — not when the whole Hollywood machine is lined up to remind us just how great he is. If moments like that keep happening, though, you might be in trouble.
There’s something almost too perfect about Justin Timberlake opening the Oscars that ended with the Moonlight/La La Land debacle. Timberlake is a creature of the machine, someone who played the early-21st-century entertainment industry like it was a piano. But what happens when the machinery breaks down? Well, Justin Timberlake is what happens. Subtly, bit by bit, the public’s perception of Timberlake shifted toward outright derision over the years. That’s not the only reason that the Trolls soundtrack song “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” was Timberlake’s final chart-topper, but it sure didn’t help. As it turned out, we actually could stop the feeling, and that’s exactly what we did.
In its moment, you could’ve seen “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” as a big comeback moment for Justin Timberlake — the grand return of pop’s one true squeaky-voiced, doe-eyed R&B heartthrob whiteboy, here to retake the position from that other Justin. After all, “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” was JT’s first #1 hit in nine years — since the FutureSex/LoveSounds era concluded with the Timbaland/Nelly Furtado team-up “Give It To Me.” That’s not quite accurate, though. It’s more that Timberlake took long breaks from his own pop stardom, chasing a bigger and broader form of cross-media fame that seemed inevitable when he first proved to be a surprisingly game Saturday Night Live host.
Timberlake’s film career is a weird one. Even in the high FutureSex period, Timberlake took parts in some wacky-ass movies. You can’t really conflate the cult-beloved sci-fi oddity Southland Tales with the howling Mike Meyers flop The Love Guru, but both came out when Timberlake was at peak coolness, and both were soundly rejected by the viewing public. In 2010, however, Timberlake seemed to turn things around by playing a key role in The Social Network, an absolute masterpiece that made metatextual use of his own pop stardom in the era that the film covered. *NSYNC were avatars of the CD sales-boom at its absolute height, and he played one of the Napster co-founders who helped end that boom. Pretty good!
Timberlake was all set to break out after that, but then he was in miss after miss after miss: Bad Teacher, Friends With Benefits, In Time. All three of those films were financially successful, but not enough for anyone to actually like or care about them. If you go from king of pop music to dependable B-list leading man, that’s not exactly an upward leap. But when Timberlake returned to pop stardom, it was a big deal. In 2013 — the same year that he was pretty great playing a small part in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis — Timberlake released his two big-deal 20/20 Experience LPs. The first was the year’s biggest-selling album. None of the singles reached #1, but a handful of them went top-10. The arena ballad “Mirrors,” the biggest of his hits from that year, peaked at #2. (It’s an 8.)
In the years after The 20/20 Experience, Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, and the Weeknd all came up and scored #1 hits. They all employed some of the same tricks as peak Timberlake. Timberlake would sometimes remind people of his chops; his last truly cool moment might’ve been his viral duet with country star Chris Stapleton at the 2015 CMA Awards. When he came back with “Can’t Stop The Feeling!,” Timberlake wasn’t quite ready to reapply for the role of biggest pop star in the world. Instead, the song was a brand extension, a way to promote his latest cinematic endeavor. But it might’ve also been a way for Timberlake to remind the world of his spot atop the pecking order — in theory, anyway.
“Can’t Stop The Feeling!” came into existence because Justin Timberlake took the lead role in Trolls, the animated musical based on those little dolls with the hair. Timberlake had already jumped into the DreamWorks Animation world when he had a part in 2007’s Shrek The Third, a real piece of shit that was also a huge success. I have never seen Trolls in full, but I hate it anyway. The ads about these chipper little ogres jumping around and singing were enough to put me off entirely. My kids were right in the target demographic, and they might’ve gone and seen it with their grandparents. I wouldn’t take them. I had deep resentment for the idea that I was expected to pay a pile of money to sit with my kids in a dark theater and let my eyes be assaulted by that ghastly-ass character design, these little munchkin motherfuckers that looked like sentient balls of cotton candy. I’ve taken my kids to plenty of bad movies, but that would not be one of them. Anyway, Timberlake played the lead in Trolls. He was a troll named Branch.
In Trolls and its two sequels, Justin Timberlake and his little buddies — Anna Kendrick, James Corden, Zooey Deschanel, Russell Brand, former Number Ones artist Gwen Stefani — communicate by chirping out old pop songs in way-too-happy jukebox-musical fashion. Timberlake helped produce the soundtrack album, and it includes versions of a few past #1 hits — “The Sound Of Silence,” “True Colors,” “Mo Money Mo Problems” — from Timberlake and his castmates. But the soundtrack’s real selling point might’ve been the reunion between Timberlake and Swedish pop god Max Martin, the man responsible for many of the biggest hits from *NSYNC and their TRL peers.
When Justin Timberlake first went solo, he sprinted away from Max Martin and the Swedish pop song-machine. This was the right move. The boy-band stuff was played out, and Timberlake knew that he had to work with cutting-edge rap and R&B producers to seem cool. It’s probably what he wanted to do, too. It paid great dividends for him. In those years, however, Max Martin reinvented himself as the master of an evolving song machine, crafting gigantic hits even with new-era mythology-heavy pop stars like Taylor Swift and the Weeknd. “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” was the first Max Martin/Justin Timberlake collaboration since the *NSYNC days, and that combination was an event. “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” was what they came up with.
In Trolls, “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” is the big showstopper-finale number, the song that brings all the trolls together or whatever. In the movie, Timberlake sings the song with the rest of the cast, but he recorded it himself for the soundtrack. I am going to embed the “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” scene from the Trolls movie here, but please don’t feel any pressure to watch it. This is for historical purposes only. I watched it, and I wish I hadn’t.
Justin Timberlake co-wrote and co-produced “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” with Max Martin and Martin’s regular collaborator Shellback, and it’s easy enough to tell what they’re going for. The song wants to be a pleasantly anodyne feelgood dance-pop song. It’s supposed to be disco, but it’s not supposed to be too disco. Justin Timberlake is supposed to sing about feeling great, and the song is supposed to throw a whole lot of platinum-plated earworm hooks at you. It’s slick, professional classic-pop revivalism in the Bruno Mars mold. The melodic bones are strong. “Can’t Stop The Feeling” can get stuck in your head all day long. With different production and vocal arrangements, it could’ve easily been an *NSYNC song.
Mark Romanek, the veteran music-video auteur who’d also made the 2010 movie Never Let Me Go, directed the “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” video, and it’s full of LA street-scenes of awkward everyday schlubs hitting ebullient dance moves. That video makes something even more blatantly obvious. A couple of years earlier, Timberlake’s old collaborator Pharrell landed a freak megahit with “Happy,” another old-timey, uptempo quasi-soul song about feeling really good. The “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” video is a blatant, outright “Happy” ripoff, and Timberlake might as well have gone door to door with a megaphone, screaming that he wanted his own “Happy.” It sort of worked, but it didn’t entirely work.
When “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” was new, I thought it was fine. I thought the same thing about “Happy” at first, too. “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” is a sticky, precision-tooled, studiously inoffensive song about having fun. How could that be bad? Justin Timberlake just wanted to hit his falsetto and make us dance! That’s a good thing, right? That’s what we want from pop stars? On repeated exposure, though, “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” felt increasingly forced. It’s by-the-numbers machine-pop, and its ultra-repetitious hook eventually felt less like an invitation, more like an unwelcome command. The bass-burps and horn-stabs and guitar-ripples arrive at the right spots, but they feel predetermined, not expressive. Timberlake’s little nasal affectations become increasingly grating, like his Ryan Reynolds-ass smirk in the video.
Things were changing. A week before “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” debuted at #1, Drake finally topped the Hot 100 with “One Dance,” a slinky and vibey halfway-house track that never bothered with Timberlake’s rictus pageant-boy grin. “Can’t Stop The Feeling!,” meanwhile, sounded like a Kidz Bop version of itself. It was a play for radio dominance at a time when radio was becoming irrelevant, and it had absolutely zero cool factor when cool factor was becoming increasingly crucial. That’s to be expected; it’s a song for a kids’ movie. “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” did mostly everything that it was supposed to do while also setting Timberlake up for one of the greatest slow-motion faceplants in pop history.
“Can’t Stop The Feeling!” debuted at #1, selling nearly 400,000 downloads in its first week. In his Slate column, my friend Chris Molanphy predicted that Timberlake’s single would be the song of the summer 2016, and that was probably the smart conventional-wisdom pick. You usually can’t see generational shifts happening as they’re happening. To be clear, “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” did business. The song only had a week at #1, but it hung around the top 10 for months. Radio loved the track; it spent a long time atop the Adult Contemporary chart. Today, the “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” single is quadruple platinum, and the Trolls soundtrack is double platinum. Trolls itself did well at the box office, too. Domestically, it brought in a little over $150 million — slightly less then X-Men: Apocalypse, slightly more than La La Land. They made two sequels. I didn’t watch those, either — or maybe I just stared at my phone through all of family movie night, I forget.
But “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” was not the song of the summer. After Timberlake’s single week at #1, Drake’s “One Dance” returned to the top spot and then held it for months. In 2016, Timberlake was a 35-year-old dad. He couldn’t be expected to compete with Drake. (Drake is now a 37-year-old dad, but that’s a story for another column.) Timberlake could be expected to compete with La La Land, but “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” lost the Oscar, predictably, to “City Of Stars,” the duet between Emma Stone and Timberlake’s old Mickey Mouse Club castmate Ryan Gosling. (“City Of Stars” missed the Hot 100, but it reached #8 on the Bubbling Under chart.) Timberlake’s next move was to star in the 2017 Woody Allen film Wonder Wheel, which didn’t even seem like a good idea at the time.
Since then, the vibe surrounding Justin Timberlake has slowly shifted into an acrid cloud of poison gas. You couldn’t point to any one scandal or fuckup for his downfall, necessarily. It’s been happening gradually, bit by bit. In 2018, Timberlake returned to the Super Bowl to headline the Halftime Show, and his performance mostly served to remind the public of the role he’d played in Janet Jackson’s downfall years earlier. Janet wasn’t getting invited back to play the Super Bowl, so why did this guy get to keep skating? The thinkpieces wrote themselves.
That Super Bowl performance coincided with Timberlake’s rollout for the hilariously misbegotten Man Of The Woods, the album that he positioned as a roots-rock move even though much of it played as wan FutureSex redux. Timberlake went country way too early, and he did it way too badly. As a result of his failure to read the room, Man Of The Woods goes down in history as a laughingstock flop. (The two highest-charting singles from Man Of The Woods, the deeply awkward “Filthy” and the Chris Stapleton collab “Say Something,” both peaked at #9. “Filthy” is a 2, and “Say Something” is a 5.)
After the Man Of The Woods debacle, Justin Timberlake went six years without releasing another album. He kept acting, but that career has vacillated between Trolls sequels and the instantly forgotten performatively gritty straight-to-streaming dramas Palmer and Reptile. The Trolls sequels stubbornly failed to yield another “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” The big single from 2020’s Trolls World Tour was “The Other Side,” a duet with SZA, an artist who will eventually appear in this column. It peaked at #61. Last year’s Trolls Band Together had a plot about boy bands. For that soundtrack, Timberlake used his break-glass-in-case-of-emergency move, and he reunited with *NSYNC. But the group’s big return song was a big nothing called “Better Place,” and it peaked at #25.
More than music or movies, the past few years of Justin Timberlake have been defined by public embarrassments. There was, for instance, the moment when he was photographed holding a co-star’s hand, thus convincing many people that he was cheating on his movie-star wife. When Timberlake’s ex Britney Spears published her memoir last year, Timberlake didn’t come off well. There was the story about how he’d gotten Spears pregnant and pressured her to get an abortion, and then there was audiobook reader Michelle Williams — Dawson’s Creek Michelle Williams, not Destiny’s Child Michelle Williams — saying “fo’ shizz fo’ shizz” when describing Justin Timberlake meeting Ginuwine.
nothing can prepare you for these 15 seconds of michelle williams doing a justin timberlake impression as written by britney spears pic.twitter.com/QCXnDmnQIL
— lucy (@heylucymay) October 24, 2023
Earlier this year, Justin Timberlake attempted a comeback with his way-too-long album Everything I Thought It Was. That shit was a hot brick. Nobody liked it, and Timberlake should probably send a gift basket to thank Katy Perry for flopping even more noisily than him. Lead single “Selfish” peaked at #19, and then none of its five thousand other tracks charted at all. A little while after the album’s release, Timberlake was arrested in the Hamptons for driving while intoxicated. Last month, he got the charge dropped by pleading down, but that couldn’t stop the schadenfreude-driven meme frenzy: the mugshot, the story about the cop who was too young to recognize him, “this is going to ruin the tour.” Timberlake hadn’t gotten that much attention in years. If anything, the arrest might’ve been a career boost.
At least financially, Justin Timberlake will be fine. Two years ago, he sold his songwriting catalog for more than $100 million. He’s famous, and he still looks good. Millennial nostalgia is a powerful force, and he could always have another big moment, especially if he doesn’t biff the next *NSYNC reunion. Maybe he’ll bring sexy back, again. If not, there’s always Vegas. At this moment, though, Justin Timberlake has found his true calling as the human embodiment of the facepalm emoji. He can’t stop that feeling.
GRADE: 3/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s Kelly Clarkson, another Max Martin collaborator who’s been in this column a bunch of times, singing “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” on a 2019 episode of her talk show:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Nothing I can see but you when you buy buy buy buy.
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