I’ve never been a fan of Justin Timberlake’s music, whether that be as a solo artist or as part of ‘N Sync.  While he’s certainly an attractive young man — cute and hot, in fact — his singing has always been the bubblegum teenybopper crap that I so hate.  Even after he left the boy band that should be credited for his entire career, his works, from “I’m Lovin’ It” to “Senorita” [sic] to “Rock Your Body” and everything in between, represented his grotesque failure to appreciate real music.  Instead, each of his songs was a production akin to any song on hundreds of other CDs released in the last two decades.  He was in a rut — or he was a rut.  In either case, nothing his name was attached to was anything close to art or entertainment.  It was all crap all the time.

It’s therefore with a great deal of surprise that I’m writing about his most recent song, “SexyBack”, that is captivating and very much a departure from the genre of pubescent junk for which he is known and to which his name has always been applied.

Before anyone else says it, let me get ahead of the curve and admit that, as a gay man, I’m certainly expected to listen to pop music, even if such music is an abhorrent violation of our auditory senses.  It comes with the territory, I’m afraid.  While I am well over that particular homosexual trait, I still find myself drawn to this particular work.

He appears to have forsaken the falsetto juvenile voice he’s long used for singing.  Instead, this is a slightly more adult electronic alteration that speaks to a level of maturity I didn’t think the poor lad was even capable of.  And while I can’t refute his good looks and general sexiness, something he’s always had but often ruined with his singing, the video for “SexyBack” shows a young man finally trying to break out of that mold and be something other than a street thug, a schoolboy, an adolescent, and any number of other childish personas he’s worn throughout his career.

Will his new album be a significant departure from his usual crap?  Will it be worth a listen?  Who the hell knows.  Regardless of its overall content, I’m happy just listening to this one song.  Sure, it’s still pop, and I’m likely to hate it by this evening, but it’s far less of his normal junk and a whole lot more of something else, perhaps even a new artist trying to escape the self-induced prison in which he’s been trapped for so long.  We’ll see.

For now, however, it’s certainly a fun song with a lot more style than I thought him capable of, and that although it is still pop.  Hey, it’ll make a great club song if nothing else.

You can hear “SexyBack” in streaming audio via his official site, or you can see the video, a slightly different version of the song, here.  As I said, it’s fun and entertaining and certainly a great deal more mature than anything else he’s done before.  I think it’s worth a listen.