So fall 2003 was a different cultural landscape. This was pre-streaming so lots of new music was still cobbled together from LimeWire as (often mislabeled) mp3s and assembled into full albums.
I was bored at work and wanted new stuff to listen to. Timberlake’s ‘Rock Your Body’ was a great summer single that year and pretty much everyone agreed with that. Plus, ‘Cry Me a River’ was a big hit and I read some piece or other about how it managed to get polyrhythms into the Top 40.
So I downloaded Justified as one of those full album mp3s that were everywhere back in those days and it was … really good. Like really good. That took some soul searching on my part since the world was still very much demarcated between SRS MUSIC and everything else. And this couldn’t be SRS … or could it?
I loved that album. When I tried to play it for friends but I couldn’t get anyone to bite.
I’d play it in the car when I had a captive audience. I’d tell people how it was the 21st century Off The Wall (vindicated on that BTW). Often you could see people fighting their enjoyment of it when they found out who it was. I was evangelical about Timberlake and Justified. And I was, as history has borne out, completely right.
So yeah. Sorry about all the Poptimism. My bad.
Also,
remember when Entourage was new and we all enjoyed the cheap pleasure of the episodic trifle of Turtle and Johnny Drama barely containing themselves in the presence of, like, whoever was big on the WB at the time but then the 2008 financial meltdown hit and overnight the whole thing just became obnoxious and in poor taste due to the new context and zeitgeist?
That’s what the new TS single feels like.
—jason malmberg
Flommist Jason Malmberg is a simple man who believes in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art sometimes. Copyright © 2017 Jason Malmberg.
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