admin @ Mon, 2006-09-11 11:00
For musicians, Prince is like the East Texas oil field: a vast source of natural energy that, if not quite limitless, runs deep enough to last another few decades. There are at least seven Prince incarnations available for appropriation—late-nineties crooners like Maxwell, for instance, picked up on Prince, the Soul Man, while Diddy has clearly fallen under the influence of Prince, the Ceaseless Changer of Names. The most timeless, however, are the Sex Fiend and the Protean Genius, and it is these that inspire Justin Timberlake and OutKast, respectively, on their new albums, FutureSex/LoveSounds and Idlewild.
He's also been working on his pickup lines. “All I need is a moment alone / To give you my tone / And put you out of control,” he swears on “FutureSex/LoveSound.” And midway through “SexyBack,” he groans, “You see these shackles baby I'm your slave / I'll let you whip me if I misbehave.” Male singers have a couple of ways to sound sexy. If blessed with elastic vocal cords, they can soar, dip, flutter, and break in a manner that serves as both an analogy for rapture and a metaphor for technical facility and self-control. Or, if blessed with a personality, they can work with knowingness, insinuation, and—most crucially—humor. Prince deployed both tactics; Timberlake has chosen the first. Unfortunately, his voice is neither deep enough for lines like “Daddy's on a mission to please” nor hysterical enough for “I've got sexy ladies / All over the floor.” And so we are reminded that this is the same man who fumbled Janet Jackson's bustier at the Super Bowl.
In upping the sexual ante, Timberlake is running away from himself, as the best song on the album, “My Love,” makes clear. With its stabbing techno riff, crunched-together mouth-popping noises, and wailing opera singer, the track is an obvious sequel to “Cry Me a River.” And working with lines like “I can see us holding hands / Walking on the beach our toes in the sand,” Timberlake's small but fervent falsetto sounds so much more sincere—and exposes him for what he really is: a nice boy who's better at being sappy than sexy. Part of what made Justified so enjoyable, after all, were charming asides like the ending of the opening track “Señorita,” when he asked “guys” to sing one verse and “ladies” to sing another.
The knock on Timberlake has always been that he owes his success to his producers. Timbaland obviously helps him out here again, but his touch is no guarantee of stardom. (If it were, then protégées like Kiley Dean and Nicole Wray would be household names.) At the very least, it can be said that Timberlake has excellent taste. If he hasn't yet invented a persona intriguing enough to live up to his music, give him credit for being one of the few white men still brave enough to make black music.
The problem with being a Renaissance man is that it sets the bar awfully high. Too high even for Prince, in fact, who aced the test of eclecticism on Sign ‘o' the Times but stumbled when he started filling subsequent albums with competent but uninspired takes on techno, reggae, and ballroom dancing. The game is to sound casually brilliant, as if your merest tossed-off invention arrives fully formed in the world; the danger is formlessness (if you're not a strong songwriter) or pastiche (if you are).
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