How “SexyBack” Changed Everything
10 years ago, Timberlake and Timbaland bridged dance, pop, and hip-hop with ‘FutureSex/LoveSounds’
Consider this: the tempo and style of the hottest record of the moment ultimately has the potential to shift the entire trajectory of pop music and culture. This is twofold; the obvious reason being that when a formula in popular music is hot, it’s replicated over-and-over again until it has been beaten to death. The other, not-so-evident reason is that nightclub DJs will ultimately build their sets around this hot record, saving it for the peak moment in the evening. And if the hottest record is 115 BPM (beats-per-minute), naturally the DJ will have to find other records that are around the same speed or style to precede and follow it.
On a micro level, said DJ might stay at this tempo for the entire evening — or summer — for that matter. On a macro level, many pop artists will then follow the trend, releasing music at that same speed and style, in order to specifically make sure they are included in nightclub playlists across the planet.
That’s exactly what happened when Justin Timberlake released “SexyBack,” the lead single to his 2006 FutureSex/LoveSounds LP, which turns ten this month and has moved over 20 million copies worldwide to date. Commercial hip-hop was ruling the clubs for almost a decade at that point, with the Jay Z & Beyoncé led brand of 100 BPM club-bangers like “Crazy In Love” and “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)” dominating most mainstream dancefloors. This was interspersed with an influx of slowed down Southern rap hits from artists like T.I. and Yung Joc that clocked around 70–82 BPM.
Justin Timberlake had briefly cracked this market two years prior with his Justified LP, led by the Neptunes-produced, Pusha T-assisted “Like I Love You” and the Timbaland-backed “Cry Me a River.” Both were huge radio hits, but registered lukewarm as club cuts. Hip-hop and open format DJs weren’t quite ready to fully embrace the former boy band singer, who just two years earlier was engaging in over-produced, soulless plastic pop as a member of *NSYNC.
Both Timberlake and Timberland were in a bit of a creative slump in 2004; While Justin had been keeping busy with other projects, such as acting in films like Shrek and Alpha Dog, he was reportedly feeling uninspired musically. “He didn’t like his voice no more, you know what I’m saying? He didn’t like what he was doing,” Timbaland said in 2007. “I was like, ‘Justin, what’s going on?’
Meanwhile Timbaland was also struggling to find inspiration, as albums on his Interscope-distributed Beat Club imprint from Bubba Sparxx and Magoo were failing to make an impact. Some surmised he was still reeling over the death of frequent collaborator Aaliyah in 2001.
“She was like blood, and I lost blood. Me and her together had this chemistry. I kinda lost half of my creativity to her. It’s hard for me to talk to the fans now. Beyond the music, she was a brilliant person, the [most special] person I ever met,” Tim told MTV in 2008.
Timbaland reflects on the duo’s creative block in his new autobiography, The Emperor of Sound:
“‘Let me ask you this. What kind of sound are you looking for?’ Justin turned on the radio in the corner of my studio and started turning the dial to various R&B and pop songs. ‘Not this,’ he said when one song came on. ‘And not this,’ he said when a formulaic R&B song came on. ‘And definitely not this,’ he said as a fluffy bubblegum pop song blared through the speakers. He switched the radio off and stared at me.”
Yet once they teamed up with collaborator Nate “Danja” Hills, the trio rediscovered their creative spark by deconstructing Justified’s “Cry Me a River.” They attempted to rebuild it from the ground up, changing bits and pieces of it so that it was not a direct copy. The result was “What Goes Around Comes Around,” the first of ten tracks they completed together for FutureSex/LoveSounds. The eventual double-platinum smash “My Love” would follow, reportedly written by Timberlake in two minutes after he heard the beat. The track had signature Timbaland beat-box drums, but very uncharacteristic electronic trance synths layered on top.
“I heard dance and techno and was always interested in it but didn’t really know where to go. But I went to a club one night and saw that people were losing their mind to these dance tracks,” Danja told Vibe in 2011. “It wasn’t really that I wanted to mimic that sound. I just wanted to have that energy and have people going crazy. So I knew the fusion was putting R&B with trance. As soon as I put the ‘boom boom kat,’ I knew it.”
These untapped electronic sounds were used abundantly on the album’s breakthrough single “SexyBack,” really separating the sonics of the entire FutureSex/LoveSounds LP from everything else. Released as the first single from the project, this record marked a turning point for Timberlake. At a speedy 117 BPM, the record was built on a four-on-the-floor house rhythm. It oozed sexuality; Justin’s distorted, muffled vocals sounded almost post-coital in their delivery, as he made references to S&M, dirty babes, and even dropped a “motherfucker” before Timbaland neighed “Take ’em to the bridge!” It showed a dark maturity that was not present on anything he’d done before, the 50 Shades of Grey of pop records of its time.
This faster tempo was employed on several other tracks on the album, such as the cocktail waitress anthem “LoveStoned” or one of the few non-Timbaland tracks, “Damn Girl,” where will.i.am slyly interpolates Flaming Ember’s “Gotta Get Away” drum breakdown, as freaked by Diamond D on “I’m Outta Here.”
And then — naturally — the formula was endlessly copied.
Soon everyone in pop had their own version of “SexyBack” to help sell their albums. Britney Spears, who had just broken up with Justin five years prior, would release the Nate “Danja” Hills produced “Gimme More” as her lead single to 2007’s Blackout. DJ Khaled would tap Hills to produce the T.I., Lil’ Wayne and Akon featured “We Takin’ Over,” which played like a rap answer to Timberlake’s “Sexy” single.
Aging 80s acts Duran Duran and Madonna would take it a step further, hiring Timbaland, Timberlake, and Danja to write and produce almost the entirety of their albums Red Carpet Massacre (2007) and Hard Candy (2008). Even Timbaland would use the formula himself on the lead single to his 2007 comeback album, Shock Value; like the others, “The Way I Are” was built on electro synths, pumping bass and a hyper 115 BPM tempo.
But despite all these artists trying to “buy” the sound of this trio, none of them could capture the magic found on FutureSex/LoveSounds. It was a perfect storm, in which Timberlake successfully left his goofy teenage image behind, while Timbaland and Danja thought outside of the box in the approach to the production. And although they were capitalizing on the uptempo, electronic sound for the single, they didn’t paint themselves into a corner for the rest of the record.
They had bangers in “Summer Love,” built upon lunchroom table boom-bap, and the Three Six Mafia featured “Chop Me Up,” which slow-stunted with Southern trap drums. Further, they sewed the entire project together like a mixtape or a DJ set, allowing tracks like “Love Stoned,” “What Goes Around,” and “Sexy Ladies” to blend into one another via extended, symphonic interludes — uncharacteristic of anything else in pop at the time. It was all over the map, yet cohesive because it was largely the work of one team.
“Once we had a few strong songs under our belt, I asked Justin, “So what do you think this album is about?” He smiled. “In one word? Sex,” Timbaland writes. “We conceived of the album as two halves of a whole. The first half, which we called FutureSex, was more aggressive and more suggestive… The second half, which we started calling LoveSounds, had a sweeter, more romantic vibe — all of the things you feel before and after you’ve had the best sex of your life.”
Despite taking the world by storm, FutureSex/LoveSounds was not universally loved, garnering lukewarm reviews at the time of its release.
“When I put it [‘FutureSex/LoveSounds’] out, everybody was laughing at me — critics, radio programmers and to their credit, I understand why. But I wanted to do something different at that time. I wanted to do something that was like, this is like nothing I hear on the radio. That was my effort with that one,” Timberlake told MySpace in 2013. “I got like terrible reviews on that record, and so to talk about it now… I just think that Tim [Timbaland] and I were onto something different and I just think that anytime you put out something different, it’s polarizing. And polarizing is good, I think, because polarizing starts a conversation.”
However many came back around by the end of the year, with the album landing on best-of-the-year lists for Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Time, The Observer and several other publications. Additionally, it would go on to be recognized as one of the top albums of the 00s by Entertainment Weekly, Spin, and Slant, even topping Vibe’s list as the best album of the decade.
Q magazine said that FutureSex/LoveSounds was a “set of forward-thinking pop reminiscent of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times.” Those kinds of comparisons — along with the “Erotic City”-esque drum programming on “Until the End of Time” — likely irked Prince, who said at a 2006 Emmy party, “For whoever is claiming that they are bringing sexy back, sexy never left!”
Justin took a shot back at Prince on Timbaland’s 2007 Shock Value single “Give it To Me” — “Now if sexy never left, then why is everybody on my shit?” But a decade on, the two must have put that spat aside sometime before he passed, as Timberlake wrote a heartfelt eulogy on Instagram: “He’s somewhere within every song I’ve ever written. I am sad, but I will smile when I think of every second that I had the fortune of being in his company.”
Ten years later, things have come full-circle, with two cool producers — Diplo and Skrillex — taking a page from the FutureSex/LoveSounds manual to help that other Justin shed his adolescent image. It worked, as the Jack Ü team found a pair of hits with a reinvented Bieber in the form of “Where R U Now” and “Sorry.”
“It definitely opened the doors for the Skrillexs, David Guettas and the Afrojacks you see today,” Danja remarked of FutureSex/LoveSounds in 2013.
But to say that FutureSex/LoveSounds is solely responsible for the EDM boom is misleading; it merely helped make it possible. Once the tempos were raised and open format DJs’ ears were opened to electronic sounds, they stayed there, inspiring other artists to follow suit. Pitbull and Flo-Rida would rip off various house classics for pop rap hits, Black Eyed Peas would take the tempos even higher for the rebranding of David Guetta’s “Love is Gone” as “I Got a Feeling,” and LMFAO would make a mockery of the whole movement yet make it bigger at the same time. With these up-tempo, electronic pop records making noise, it would only be natural that DJs would take things a step further by mixing in records from Afrojack, Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, Fedde Le Grande and countless big room EDM acts. This would not have been possible if we were forever stuck at hip-hop BPMs of 72–100.
Observing the tenth anniversary of FutureSex/LoveSounds, Danja summed up his thoughts on its influence this past week: “We shocked the world and shifted the music business. [We] let open the floodgates for EDM to be accepted in the mainstream music world. We changed the game for good, for at least 8–9 years.”
If you enjoyed reading this, please click the ♥ below. This will help to share the story with others.
