The New King Of Pop
This year, Justin Timberlake rocked your body, and
Cameron Diaz's, too. And he earned some cred, trading in teen beats for R&B
swagger.
by Jenny Eliscu
At The Butcher Shop, a steakhouse in downtown Memphis,
a banquet-sized table is crowded with people who are all somehow associated
with Justin Timberlake: his mother and stepfather, Lynn and Paul Harless
(who comanage his career), his best friend's girlfriend, his publicist, some
family friends, business associates, me. We pass our time laughing and drinking
wine and eating filet mignon and twice-baked potatoes, but we're really just
waiting for Timberlake. It's early October, and he is on his way home to
film a prime-time concert for NBC, scheduled to air the day after Thanksgiving.
He won't arrive in Memphis until later tonight, when he flies in on a private
plane from Detroit. Arrangements are made for a car to pick him up at the
airport, but Timberlake calls more than once to see if his parents are willing
to come get him. "He sounds cranky," says Lynn, more with affection than
annoyance, after chatting with her son on her cell.
Timberlake's name doesn't come up again at the dinner
table until Lynn notices my tattoos and starts telling me about getting her
own ink backstage at one of her son's shows. Paul is reminded of how Timberlake
persuaded them to let him pierce his ear when he was thirteen. All of his
friends had done it, and Justin was begging to get his pierced, too. So Paul
came up with a way to make him earn the privilege. "I told him, 'You have
to write a song and sing it at a family gathering,'" he says, beaming with
fatherly pride. Paul even drew up a little contract, to show his resolve.
Timberlake went to his room and wrote "The Earring Song" -- a little ditty
that stole it's tune from Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy." He sang
it for his parents on the beach during a Hawaiian vacation, and as soon as
they got back to Memphis, he went to the mall and got his earring put in.
When I finally lay eyes on Timberlake the following afternoon,
he is a moving target. He is shooting background material for the TV special,
and for hours he zips from location to location -- Sun Studio, a Beale Street
blues club, an old-school general store in the sticks, his parents' home
-- in an iridescent-blue Jeep, trailed closely by a police escort. Really,
it's just another busy day in what has been a relentlessly busy year for
the twenty-two-year-old Timberlake. He has been hustling almost nonstop during
the eleven months since his solo debut, Justified, was released; his
only break was a two-week trip to Hawaii in September that he says was marred
by the constant assault of paparazzi stalking him and his girlfriend, Cameron
Diaz. But the work paid off: Justified has sold more than 3 million
copies, surpassing even his own expectations. In October, his performance
as host of Saturday Night Live, where he dressed in drag as Jessica
Simpson, did a note-perfect impersonation of his pal Ashton Kutcher and donned
an omelet costume to play a pitchman, was so unexpectedly funny that he's
fielding offers for feature-film roles. He spent the summer touring Europe
and the U.S. on a blockbuster double bill with Christina Aguilera. In August,
he won three MTV Video Music Awards, and then won three more at the European
version of the VMAs a few weeks ago.
His position as the biggest pop star of 2003 is not uncontested
-- 50 Cent sold more albums and Clay Aiken generated more cultish hysteria
-- but Timberlake was the man of the year for a more substantive reason:
This was his time to prove he's not just a boy-band star, not just Britney
Spears' ex-boyfriend or Cameron Diaz's current boyfriend, not just a hunky
white boy emulating Michael Jackson. During the tour with Aguilera, he played
late-night aftershows at small venues, just him and his band -- no glitzy
props or choreography, just a good old-fashioned rock show. Instead of running
with bubblegum pop stars, he hangs out with the Neptunes, John Mayer, Black
Eyed Peas, Coldplay's Chris Martin and even the Strokes. Somewhere along
the way, Timberlake attained the one thing most pop stars don't, and the
one thing he wanted more than anything else: credibility.
"It's a liberating thing to walk out onstage and see people
your age and up," he says when we sit down alone together over beers two
weeks later in New York. "And they're not screaming just because you're standing
there, they're screaming because you did something to impress them. They
don't put your poster on their wall -- they just like your record." Timberlake
is dressed, casually, in what is either a vintage T-shirt or a very good
facsimile thereof, a brown polyester Pony sweat jacket, jeans and sneakers.
His newly shorn hair is barely an inch long, and he has grown a bit of a
goatee since I saw him in Memphis.
"I know people have an image of me in their head, but
I want them to be able to see past that," he says. "I want them to see the
musicality of what I'm doing. There's a portion of people who enjoy what
I do. And it's been proven. There's a weight lifted off my shoulders. I don't
have to worry about that part anymore."
Lynn Harless says that Timberlake's success this year
has come as a welcome surprise. "At the VMAs, when he won the award [for
Best Male Video] and Eminem and 50 Cent stood up to applaud, that left such
an impression on him," she says. "That was respect from a part of the industry
that had dogged the boy-band thing. Not that he's ever been lacking in confidence
-- because the child would argue with God -- but I think it's made him feel
more confident."
It wasn't all smooth sailing for Timberlake this year.
When I ask whether he would change anything that happened in 2003, he laughs
and says, "The SARS concert in Toronto. That was really tough for me to go
through." It was a rude awakening for a guy who was feeling pretty on top
of the world. At the summer benefit concert, Timberlake was the odd pop star
on a bill headlined by the Rolling Stones and also featuring AC/DC, the Guess
Who and Rush. During his three-song set, an audience full of angry Canadians
pelted him with water bottles. "It messed with my head for a good two weeks,"
he says. "But I saw it coming. I woke up that morning, and I said, 'I think
these people who are coming to the show are just really going to hate me.'
But when Mick Jagger asks you to come do a benefit concert, do you say no?
And then he says, 'I want you to do "Miss You" with me, as well.' I'm like,
'Are you kidding? I might actually spontaneously combust if I get to grace
the same stage with you. I might actually shoot a wad into the crowd.'"
It's just before 11 P.M. when Timberlake arrives at Rendezvous,
a famous Memphis barbecue joint around the corner from the New Daisy Theatre,
where rehearsals for Justin: Down Home in Memphis have just wrapped.
A series of banquet tables are lined up in rows in the restaurant's back
room, but Timberlake's party needs only two: one for the grown-ups and one
for the rest of us--Timberlake; Diaz; his best friend, Trace Ayala; Trace's
girlfriend, Elisha Cuthbert, of TV's 24; and Timberlake's childhood
friend Matt Morris (who was actually with Justin when he sang "The Earring
Song" for his parents on that Hawaiian beach). When I deign to ask Timberlake
if he's sampled the food at Virgil's, a New York barbecue restaurant, he
and Ayala offer a lecture on why beef ribs suck and how eating them in Memphis
would border on the sacrilegious.
Timberlake exhibits a strange combination of pride and
embarrassment about the South. More than once, he puts on an exaggerated
drawl to make a self-deprecating remark about being unsophisticated or ignorant
because he's a Southerner. It's an odd concession: Though he got much of
his education on the road with tutors and calls himself a narcoleptic reader
("I literally fall asleep"), Timberlake is bright, well-spoken and a keenly
attentive conversationalist. "Maybe I'm just a good listener," he demurs.
The pride, meanwhile, comes into play whenever Timberlake
talks about the culture of the South, especially the music of his upbringing.
"I grew up listening to country music," he says. "I listened to things that
were out on the radio, but also my grandfather taught me about Johnny Cash
and Willie Nelson and the importance that they had and how they were the
ambassadors of country music."
When he started performing as a little boy, Timberlake
sang country and gospel music. "When the family found out I could sing,"
he says, "they were dressing me into country or gospel, because that's what
was big in the area." At age eleven he began hearing blues music and became
intrigued by how the primordial stomp of the blues had influenced all the
other stuff he was listening to. "I started wondering how the blues got started,"
he says. "But I was listening to Brian McKnight, because he was on the radio.
That's when I got into rhythm and blues -- Al Green, Stevie Wonder and Marvin
Gaye."
Timberlake's parents divorced when he was two, and when
he would visit his biological father, Randy, they would play albums by the
Eagles and Bob Seger. "I remember I listened to 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' by Queen,
over and over. I locked myself in my room and turned off the lights and listened
to it for two days straight. I'd only come out for food or water. I wanted
to dissect every part of it."
But if little Justin had such varied tastes in music,
you wouldn't have known it from the music he's made with 'NSync. "I was so
anxious to be involved with music," he says. "Not that I'm speaking badly
about anything I've done, but I just didn't know any better."
The million-dollar question, then, is whether Timberlake
will stay on his own, or go back to the boy-band thing. Since he began work
on Justified last year, he has cagily avoided discussing how his solo
career might affect the future of 'NSync. He has tended to say, diplomatically,
that "those guys will always be my brothers." OK, so JC Chasez had a minor
radio hit with "Blowin' Me Up (With Her Love)," and Joey Fatone was adorable
in his small role in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Lance Bass, like,
tried to go into outer space or something, and Chris Kirkpatrick -- wait,
which one is he again? There is no doubt that Timberlake has outgrown 'NSync.
Even he seems to be aware of it now.
"I think that whole time [with 'NSync], I was living in
some small shape of oblivion," he says. "I thought, 'they're just putting
that teen-pop label on us because they don't understand.' I look back now
and realize that that's exactly what it was. Like, why did I think it was
something else? When I realized that, I did two things. One, I said, 'I don't
want to do teen pop again.' And two, 'I don't want to ever not realize something
for what it is.' I wasn't able to look at the bigger picture and realize
that there was this whole thing going on, this whole movement, like, Disneyworld
is taking over. And looking back on it now, how fucking frightening is that?
I've had some of the greatest experiences with those guys, but do I think
that what I've done with [Justified] is ten times better than anything
'NSync has ever done? Yes, I do. But I'm a cocky bastard."
Timberlake's tour bus is parked in back of the New Daisy
Theatre, where his TV special will be filmed later tonight. He makes himself
a cup of Throat Coat tea and plops down on the couch to tape a dozen radio-station
IDs that will air in the cities he's about to visit on his European solo
tour. The conversation turns to smoking cigarettes, and Cuthbert announces
that more women are smokers than men. "And that's why there's a blow-job
shortage in this country," Timberlake quips. "Y'all are getting your oral
fixation satisfied elsewhere."
I decide not to ask whether that's a personal gripe, since
Diaz and Spears both smoke. In fact, we don't discuss his sex life at all.
I have been warned that he won't talk on that subject, and he tenses up even
when I ask what he's learned about relationships from his parents. He offers
little more than a facile "I've learned that you have to agree to disagree."
I ask him about his first crush, and he says, "I'm not gonna go down that
road. Ironically, I caught up with her. So I'm not gonna go down that road."
He is tenaciously private, it seems, because he gets to
keep so little to himself. He and Diaz have been trailed by paparazzi ever
since they got together this summer. He says that during their trip to Hawaii
in September, he had to haggle with photographers in order to get some space
alone with his girlfriend. "There was one [photographer] that kept following
me," he says. "And I pulled over and went up to his car and said, 'You have
a telephoto lens and you still need to drive this close to me? Look, you
know I'm gonna be on the beach. You know I'm gonna be around, I'm not gonna
sit and hide. But, please, you have the technology to be at least half a
mile away from me and get a great shot. So why don't you just do it that
way?' And he did. They still got their shots, and it still pissed me off,
but at least they backed off."
He says that the constant harassment has occasionally
made him think about quitting the business. "I've said before that I don't
want to do it anymore, and that it's just not worth it," he says. "People
have said, 'Well, that's the price you pay.' And I say, 'Really? Somebody
forgot to send me that bill. Do you do what you love to do? Because that's
what I do.'" He's not likely to throw in the towel anytime soon, but he admits
that he'd like to take on a more behind-the-scenes role when he gets a little
older. "I keep joking with my family and friends that I'm gonna retire when
I'm thirty," he says. "But I don't even know where I'm going to be next year.
Last year was the most tortuous year of my life. And this year, it's as if
some higher power was like, 'All right, you passed that test, now here you
go, here you go, here you go.'"
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