On Justin Timberlake And The Tragedy Of White Male Pop Stars In The Era of Trump

All white guys aren’t Trump, but when “black” dudes go white…

As opposed to what is apparently the entire total of public opinion, I’ll state that Justin Timberlake’s Man Of The Woods is objectively not a bad album. Instead, it’s problematic not from a musical standpoint, but from the place of being the first album we’ve heard from Timberlake that shows him as a fully grown middle-aged man and not a teenaged electro-titan or iconic MTV-ready sexpot. Moreover, it’s the first time that Justin has ever, in a quarter-century as a performer, revealed himself as foremost — and moreover shockingly as he’s likely always been deep down inside — a white man. Brazenly, he’s a white man singing country songs at a time where white people who stereotypically like country music are cast as evil, enraged rednecks who made a decision last November to set free conservative American sins upon the liberal, hyper-intellectual universe. Let’s be honest. A Justin Timberlake album in 2018 is supposed to be the pop cultural canonization of a magical alt-left grown adult meant to be the heroic figure upon which we could cast all of hopes and dreams of backing down the scourge of Trump-ism. Instead, JT’s apparently letting us down as a white dude with a guitar, a wife, a kid, and a bottle of…