Hey y'all, DJ Louis here just dropping a snippet of our latest pop pantheon all access episode in which Voxes Kendall Cunningham, Russ and I are discussing not only Justin Timberlake's latest album, everything I thought it was, but also how we arrived at this moment in Justin Timberlake. All of the forces, either that he engendered or that happened to him that changed how Justin Timberlake is thought of in the last 10 years, and whether this new record does anything meaningful to address any of that stuff or write

the ship of his career. If you enjoy this snippet, you can subscribe to hear the rest of this

episode plus bonus episodes every week of the show at patreon.com slash pop pantheon or by clicking

the link in the show notes of this episode or by subscribing directly in the Apple Podcasts app for audio only. So here's a snippet of that episode with Kendall and Russ.

All right. We are here with a very special guest, Kendall Cunningham, a culture writer at Vox,

who recently reported on Justin Timberlake's comeback attempt. You can read the piece of our box.com. Is Justin Timberlake the pop star anyone wants? Kendo, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. And of course, hi, Louie. Louie, you are quoted in this excellent piece. Yes. Kendall reached out to me, and she asked me her questions. I ended up having so much to say that I sent

her like tomes and tomes and tomes about my thoughts on Justin Timberlake. I had more to say than I

realized, which I'm excited to get to regurgitate here. But I had the honor of being quoted in that

piece, which is really great. If you're looking for something to sort of like bring you up to speed on the

entire Justin Timberlake situation at the moment from every conceivable angle, I highly

recommend you read the piece. So that is part of what we are going to discuss today. In addition

to everything I thought it was, the sixth studio album from Justin Timberlake having come out just

a few days ago, I want to unpack some of the things from this piece and unpack some of what has happened

over the past decade-ish with the celebrity narrative and the on-record persona to an extent too of Justin Timberlake.

I think that we can probably all agree that sometime in the mid-s, things started to go quite awry for Justin regarding his public narrative.

For both of you, when do you think that this public narrative starts to shift?

And what are some of the key factors accounting for the change and how pop fans and the general public see Justin?

Yeah, I mean, I got to revisit a lot of, like, smaller, like, microcontroversies that led up to the Britney and Janet stuff, obviously being revisited and reassessed.

People online sort of began side-eyeing Justin around, like, the early 2010s after the 2020 experience.

There were a lot of broader conversations

about culture appropriation and white artists and white celebrities profiting off of black

culture. Something that I talked about or brought up in the piece, which I completely

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