[alternate title: I Am Not Afraid of K-Fed and I Will Beat His Ass]
Couple months back a friend of mine sent me a link to some video he and this other dude put together. (You should watch it. Search for "justin timberlake's new song wow" at YouTube; it's the first link.) The video's a joke, obviously, a goof on how cheesy the new Justin Timberlake song is; but it's a joke I didn't get the first time I watched it, for a whole bunch of reasons. Although I was aware of Kevin Federline's existence, I failed to i.d. him by sight alone. Plus I didn't realize his nickname was "K-Fed" (jesus); moreover, I had absolutely no idea he was pursuing a music career. So that part of the joke was totally lost on me. The other part of the joke I didn't get was the song itself, which I had never heard before, and to which my initial reaction was, What the fuck was that? It sounded kind of like "In Da Club," only played twice as fast, and way less sing-songy -- almost totally amusical, in fact, if that's even a word. (Just looked it up -- it isn't.) There was no way in hell I would have ever, ever guessed it was the lead single from the new Justin Timberlake record.
But guess what? I hated "Like I Love You," Justified's lead single, the first time I heard that too. I now love that song (and album) so much I'm having a hard time remembering why I hated it so much initially. Probably it had something to do with the "I've been dreaming about this since I was a little boy" bit, which I still think is kind of weird, but it's a good weird -- Prince-weird as opposed to creepy-weird. In any rate, I was wrong.
My point is this: Timberlake and Timberland have outsmarted me before, and guess what? They did it again. "SexyBack" is a great, great song, a gleeful experiment in minimalist sonic stoopidity. The jittery synths, the Timberlake-Timbo call-and-response, the dumbass lyrics, the "take em to the bridge!" and weirdly exuberant "yeah!"s that punctuates the verses -- it's all very funny and sexy, probably more of the former than the latter but who cares; it's just good music is what it is.
Anyway, the new album comes out tomorrow. (For more information on it as well as that new Yo La Tengo ass-beating record, check out Prefix's Week in Preview feature, and don't forget Prefix is your one-stop internet shop for all things music-related bitchezzzz.) I haven't heard the whole thing yet, so you'd better believe I am ridiculously geeked (previous word choice not an accident) about what could turn out to be the album of the year: the new record by Justin Timberlake, Futurama/CrazyRobotSex or whatever the fuck it's called.