What goes around comes back around… and around…
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[4.70]
Al Shipley: How much of the Timberlake/Timbaland catalog consists of songs that sound exactly like “Cry Me A River” and “What Goes Around”? 40 per cent? At least this album doesn’t have the word “future” in the title, I guess.
[1]
Alfred Soto: Going eight minutes because he can, this Brillo-haired dork belts awkwardly over a rejected “What Comes Around…” percussive loop — a marketing concept this shrewdie will no doubt appropriate. Better then to think the angst is self-directed: in the mirror he sees aesthetic paralysis in the guise of Bruno Mars.
[4]
Brad Shoup: Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Justin Timberlake is kind of a choad, right?
[5]
Ian Mathers: Too much money and talent has been poured into this for it to be outright bad, but it sure as hell is not compelling on its own merits. And then we hit “you reflect me, I love that about you,” which is gross enough it feels like it was airdropped in from one of his Lonely Island guest spots.
[4]
Will Adams: I’m having trouble seeing how these eight minute suites aren’t totally self-indulgent. The first five minutes are one big whine over an overused metaphor. It’s like some pre-emptive penance we have to pay in order to unlock the lovely coda, which Timberlake doesn’t even have the decency to turn into a full song — all he’s doing is vamping over the top. Unfortunately, the more I loop those last three minutes, the more I question whether I like it solely because it’s salvation from the drivel that preceded it.
[3]
Iain Mew: The minimalist and direct last section, with its mantra of “You are the love of my life” and gorgeous twinkling synths, has more impact than all of the tortured metaphors and increasingly ridiculous fanfares of the first section can manage in twice the time. The thing is that the limited commonality and the juxtaposition of the two sections both add so little that there’s no reason to listen to the whole thing at all.
[5]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Here’s a free lifehack for you, readers of The Singles Jukebox: open up the media player of your choice, select “Mirrors” and change the start time to 5:24 i.e. roughly when the gorgeous Terius Nash-leaning coda begins. Before that, there are over five minutes of sports montage music with every possible Timbaland splutter-mouth percussion trick laid underneath (once wonderful, now a crutch), then a Bonnie Tyler-esque chorus with all the world’s strings slathered on top, then… well, really that is most of it. Over and over, louder and louder, at least until the music drops into a set of stadium hand claps and JT celebrates a Phyrric victory with some vocal runs. “Suit & Tie” was hesitantly received on its release but it continues to surprise a month and change after it dominated radio. Hearing it in a sweatbox environment last weekend through a good pair of subwoofers and amongst a dancefloor full of pissed revellers highlighted just how elegantly alien it is, even before Jay-Z’s lurching bullet-time verse begins. As relentlessly busy as it is, “Mirrors” is just boring. The outro — that scratchy, lovely dedication to newly married life — very, very nearly makes it worth it. But that’s what lifehacks are for. Lifehacked edit: [8] As a whole:
[4]
Scott Mildenhall: It’s 2006! It’s 2002! And it’s 1998, all at once. The ’90s aspect is the most interesting; the pained down-on-my-knees-and-begging-you-please over-earnestness and, curiously, scratchy vocals recalling some of Justin’s earliest ‘N Sync recordings, those made when he was just 15 and the scratchiness came naturally. The difference between them and “Mirrors” is 17 years of musical and life experience. With something like “Tearin’ Up My Heart” he was merely acting out a role; these days he knows exactly what he means, and who he means it towards. Justin Timberlake is Grown Up now. Nonetheless, “Mirrors” is about a thousand times more overwrought than any ’90s boyband single you could care to mention, and around twice as long. It’s completely brilliant and completely ludicrous, and yet, for maybe the first time, completely sincere.
[9]
Anthony Easton: Works about obsessive looking into mirror suggest an anxious or neurotic refracting of an unstable identity (see the fairy tales of Snow White, or films like Last Year in Marienbad, Vertigo, or the Candyman horror movies, or pop songs like Bowie’s “Cracked Actor,” or Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” or the theories of Mulvey or Lacan). Narcissus gazed so far into the pond, it “stared back to him” and he wasted away — he could literally “get no back to me.” A psychoanalytic theory argues that the place where the homosocial sublimates into the homosexual, and the self is lost to the other, happens in this gaze: the staring/wasting away of Narcissus is a way to engage in a precise erotic looking without engaging in the sexuality that might follow it. Timberlake’s eight-minute obsessive production hints at those two intertwined theories, but it shifts to something quite different. It has him staring in the pond, the split of the personae, but it concentrates on someone else — and it lacks a complete anxiety. The production is so excessive, so obsessive, that any ideas we might have been about mirror float into silver gossamer. The lyrics can be ignored.
[9]
Katherine St Asaph: Guys, I just don’t know about this Sophie B. Hawkins remix.
[3]