Welcome to the New York Times

podcast, your same glow, same dough.

Of music music and music criticism,

I'm your host John Karamanica.

If they saw what I saw. on Caramonica. And baby I would never tell if they know what I don't. You're listening to selfish.

Selfish is a song. It's a single from the new Justin Timberlake record, everything I thought it was.

We're going to get into the J.T. conundrum this week. There's Stark Times, Stark Times in J.T. land land both publicly and creatively.

In our first segment, Stephen J Horowitz from Variety's gonna pull up

and we're gonna talk about this most recent album,

what it does well, what it does less well,

some potential future pathways

to get JT out of the funk,

and I don't mean the good kind,

that seems to have been hovering over him the last few years creatively and that

creative funk certainly goes hand in hand with a personal stretch of time where he is

apologizing for past behavior and is being held to account for how he

allegedly treated Brittany Spears in their relationship, how he handled

Janet Jackson after Super Bowl incident 20 years ago.

So in the second segment, Hochanda Sanders is going to call in and she, a former journalist,

also has a new novel, it's called Women of the Post, at the time in 2004 wrote very astutely and very

presently about that incident and how Janet was being unfairly punished and Justin was essentially being let off the hook.

I know that's sort of how most people think about that incident now or at least most people on Twitter think about that incident now.

...