The Anticlimactic Return Of Justin Timberlake

It has been seven years away from music for Justin Timberlake (and the return of David Bowie a week or so prior may have raised stakes a little) and he has a good deal of rust to shake off. His new song "Suit & Tie" is at first a decent song that turns into an uninspired rehash of his older material. It also features a completely useless verse from Jay-Z (who hasn't done much interesting or good since returning from his retirement, minus Watch The Throne) that turns the song from halfway decent into a terrible mess.

Now that that's over with let's move onto some things that are actually interesting. Justin Timberlake is back and has a new album due out sometime this year, called The 20/20 Experience, which is great news for anyone who is a fan of the singer's previous work like myself. But it's hard to not be a bit wary of this album already.

Adding onto that "Suit & Tie" is simply not good is the strange way that everything about how this new song and information about The 20/20 Experience was released. It all seems to have come from a guy who spent so much time away that he indulged his ego through people's sadness over his absence and in turn grew to believe that his return was a miraculous event. This was apparent when Timberlake posted a video where he talked about how he was taking his time with his return to music in a voiceover as we follow him in a long tracking shot to his studio. First, the voiceover was made to sound like it was him talking to some random person the whole time, but you can tell it's something he wrote and is trying to act out. It doesn't work. But this is forgivable.

Second, the ending of the video is stupid. The final moments show Timberlake taking off his fedora, putting on some headphones in a sound booth, and looking at someone off camera and stating, "I'm ready". Get it? It means he's ready to return to music.

But instead of giving us all a new song, or an idea of what the hell is going on, he made the world wait. For three days. To sum up, the video tells us rather explicitly that he has made new music, which had been practically confirmed days before by several media outlets, and he released no new music. He seemed to forget that while he is finally ready; his fans have been ready and waiting for seven years.

It's fine that Timberlake took his time to actually be passionate about the music he makes again, but why the pointless tease through this video after a seven year wait with no real, immediate pay off? Granted, in Timberlake's favor, a new Destiny's Child song was released that day and maybe he didn't want to detract from his soon-to-be-revealed collaborator's wife. But still, no new music at all? Not even about thirty seconds worth of it in that video as we watch him walk into his studio instead of the dumb voiceover?

If anything Timberlake's return, which is an exciting thing despite the messy way it was handled, is a show of how not to do a return in the wake of David Bowie showing us how exactly to do one. While Bowie has more collateral and is more important than Timberlake will ever be, you only need to look at the approaches of both men to understand where things went wrong.

Timberlake dragged his announcement out over a few days and made people wait for him. Cryptic tweets were thrown from his camp to stoke the fires and draw people to his website. But his first announcement landed with a thud since people were expecting a song and they didn't get that, only another wait on top of the seven years they had already been waiting. Bowie though just dropped the news of an album and a new song "Where Are We Now?" without any warning on the same day, his 66^th birthday. It also helps that Bowie's song is fantastic.

All in all, while the single is a disappointment this doesn't mean the album will be. Timberlake didn't announce a firm date for album and could re-work some things by the time the year ends. He could even pull a cue from Jay-Z here. The first single off Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch The Throne was the similarly underwhelming "H.A.M" and that ended up as a bonus song on the deluxe version of the album The mediocre response to "H.A.M" caused Jay-Z and Kanye West to completely rethink their album and re-record parts of it. "Suit & Tie" would be a good fit for that bonus song spot and it might be that Timberlake needs some time out to re-work some things before releasing his album as well. Without a doubt he has better songs hiding in him still. Or at least, after a seven year absence, we hope he still does.