You're Probably Gonna Start a Fight

It's a dark time to be a living, conscious person. I'm not saying I regret procreating, though I do understand the argument that it seems irresponsible to have brought other humans into this world that includes desert summers at the North Pole and an American presidency that defies parody. And yes, two people having three children is bad math for a global population already struggling to sustain itself. And the math gets worse as we face down the possibility of habitat collapse, climate refugees and the coming Resource Wars. But there are two ways to look at it: are we in trouble because we'll have more mouths to feed when there's less for everyone, or are we actually going to be in better shape because when the tussle starts, we'll have one more set of hands to wield a crude spear or a shiv or a ball-peen hammer or whatever than you do? When there are seven people and one can of SPAM, all politics are local as fuck. Sometimes as local as the middle of the other guy's sternum.

There's no way to devote this precious, precious blogspace to the cataloguing the wrongs of this world without having it devolve into a morass of morbidity and recrimination. And for that we already have The Failing New York Times, hey now!

Over the past week I've devoted myself to searching the internet to find something uplifting, something positive, something so objectively and universally good it could only bring us--ALL OF US--together as one human family.

But it's the internet, so I really tried searching for that for a solid 25-40 seconds before I got equal parts bored and scared and decided instead to do a song-by-song review of a boy band album from 19 years ago.

::HOLD ON TO YOUR ASS, HERE WE GO::




No Strings Attached

by *NSYNC (Lance Bass, JC Chasez, Joey Fatone, Chris Kirkpatrick and Justin Timberlake)

produced by, like, fifty people I swear to God

released March 21, 2000


I admit that initially I thought I was going to be doing a 20th anniversary retrospective of this landmark prefabricated barely disguised doo-wop outfit's massive global hit album, but then I realized that's still like seven months away. But hey fuck it, I wanna listen to some turn-of-the-millennium whiteboy lite R&B and feel OK about stuff!

And I should say something up front: despite what you just read, this is not going to be an ironic or snobbish deconstruction or dismissal of this album or the *NSYNC oeuvre. First of all, I'm an historian by education and avocation, so I do have the ability to examine a topic dispassionately in order to reconstruct a context and understand it as it was in its historical moment. Secondly, I actually dig the hell out of really good pop music. It took me a long time to be able to admit that publicly as I was too busy trying to find the right obscure collection of singing introverts and commercial failures to profess my undying devotion to in order to extract my own cultural relevance and credibility, like a fucking vampire. It was the accumulation of age and experience that caused me eventually to look back at the XTCs and They Might Be Gianteses of my playlists to get me to realize that what I liked was big fat hooks and choruses with harmonies. You know, pop music.

Because of all that strained posing I was doing through my early twenties, I would have very meticulously avoided listening to anything like *NSYNC on purpose, subconsciously knowing I would immediately love a lot of it and I'd probably have to immediately throw out all my Aimee Mann CDs. It's been an experience researching this piece as I see the baby faces of boys I know now to be men of roughly my age singing and performing at a time when they were at the pinnacle of musical socio-cultural relevance. If I were more diligent, I'd conduct another search to find the German word I have no doubt actually exists that describes the feeling of nostalgia for a thing you never fully experienced in the first place.

For background, *NSYNC was a creation of impresario and big giant cootie Lou Pearlman, whose career included drawing teenaged boys to Orlando in order to promise them international superstardom in an all-singing, all-dancing touring revue. In the end, this went about as well as it all suggests. But the whole imbroglio and resultant separation of *NSYNC from Pearlman gave us the super awesome title of this super awesome thing. Let's listen to it right now!


1. "Bye Bye Bye" There was nothing wrong per se with the singles from the group's first album. They were definitely adequate enough in and of the time to sell almost 10 million copies to date. But that was a tightly controlled machine production designed to sell records in Europe, where the band started out performing before trying to really land in the U.S. The results were danceable, fine, but lacked finesse or edge. The lyrics tended to meander and lacked wit or often even rhyme. It was all the faux sincerity of appeal rather than the better-disguised faux sincerity of expression. In the end, that work holds up less well, coming across as teenagers reading out their homework (while dancing). From the opening note on this track, however, something different is happening. The production is clean and clear, rightly emphasizing the remarkable lead voices (JC and JTimbo) and the thick five-part harmonies under a propulsive, more rock-leaning bed. Kicking more ass than "Tearin' Up My Heart" is not a tall order, but this song stomps it until it's all the way dead and mostly unrecognizable by its own family. By the time JC Chasez goes off on a held, over the top "bye-bye" that stops the song mid-outro, we're somewhere else, somewhere we couldn't have been in that first album just three years earlier. This is an excellent pop song.

2. "It's Gonna Be Me" This is an even better pop song. Honestly, the intros of these songs are very similar, yes. Maybe it's just the sprinkling of minor chords here and there to twist the prechorus and chorus into even more of a relentlessly burrowing earworm. Maybe it's just half a heartbeat slower than its lead-in song giving it more of a weight and self-assuredness, maybe it's the genre purity of its R&B roots, maybe it's the annual April 30th meme-tastic reminder we get that it exists, maybe its all those things in parts. The backing vocals and harmonies sit perfectly behind the leads, who are allowed to extemporize and reach in service of the slightly angry, slight beseeching tone of the lyric, never feeling unnecessary, forced or showy. Of all the songs about gross stalker behavior that would never get made today, this is undoubtedly my favorite. Overall it's an absolutely fearsome one-two punch of two songs that could arguably be among the best pure pop songs released in the last 25-30 years and here they are, back to back on one album.

3. "Space Cowboy (Yippie-Yi-Yay)" Look, I know the history of forgettable or even bad songs used to pad out an album that otherwise contains real musical achievement is as long as the music industry itself. But even with that context, I don't know what the fuck this is. It starts out like sounding exactly like the kind of thing you'd hear over the closing credits of a direct-to-VHS action movie starring maybe Jason Gedrick. But then it devolves into weird yippie-yi-yos and then... Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes (RIP) blasts out the rap break? I'm lost. After the opening, this is such a Wile E. Coyote falloff, we're all hanging in the air for just a second before gravity mercifully delivers us to the unforgiving ground a thousand feet below.

4. "Just Got Paid" Fine. Just stick to the Johnny Kemp original. The energy is nice, but this one manages to deliver a rare off note for JC Chasez. And it also entirely confirms the whiteness of the group, bless 'em.

5. "It Makes Me Ill" A bass line more than a song, but it's propulsive and brief enough. It's better than the awful title, that's for sure. Of all the songs on this album, it's the most vocally indulgent. The harmonies are more listenable than the leads, but there's some punch to the chorus and the lyric-heavy verses. Survivable, but I just got done listening to it and I've already mostly forgotten it.

6. "This I Promise You" Not to be hyperbolic, but this is easily the most important song on this album, maybe in the whole historical diorama of the late-1990s boy band period. There's nothing inherently wrong with the Richard Marx-penned (yes THAT Richard Marx) lyrics and melody. In fact, a lot of it not only works, but is perfectly suited to these singers at this moment. Again, it's a showcase for Timberlake and Chasez, leaning heavily toward the latter. The second verse alone is in the running for the best one among all the boy band songs, followed by a stirring middle-eight and the penultimate chorus, daring the backing track to keep up. In this song more than any other we can hear that Justin's voice is a tenor sax where JC's is brass, a fact best illustrated by the sound mix on this live version where his mic is turned down because they know where he's going. But holy shit, is this song let down by the production choices. The music was ten years out of date before this was even released with its dull-ass strings and Spanish-guitar solo. This could have been the one that broke *NSYNC out entirely from the pack, especially after the first two songs on this album, but this ballad lacks the pop bounce of either "I Want It That Way" or even "Back For Good," both ultimately better songs. That said, I still sing the shit out of this one in the shower.

7. "No Strings Attached" I guess the album needed a title track. It could have been about modern hookup culture, but it's a conventional lyric about love with a painfully dated band-hit-heavy backing track that is both loud and sleepy at the same time.

8. "Digital Get Down" I know the title is immediately making you think: finally, a song about fingerbanging. But no! It's actually about pre-Skype pre-FaceTime video sex chat. At the time, I guess on an AOL video chat service? I'm immediately frustrated by the idea. The vocoder use is novel (for the time) and I guess fits the theme, if a bit on the nose. It also says you can do it "20,000 miles away" which is dumb considering the earth at its widest point is 24,000 miles around. So 20,000 miles away is really only about 4,000 miles away (at most) in the other direction. Still far, sure, but I mean come on, think about this shit.

9. "Bringin' Da Noise" This is the '90s-est title of any song ever. Yep, it's about what "girl" needs to do with "that body." It's a dance tune with little personality or thought.

10. "That's When I'll Stop Loving You" This is a Diane Warren song. Would you like to guess when the protagonist will stop loving you? If you guessed at the extreme end of some metaphysical process or astrophysical cataclysm up to and including universal entropy (more suggested than stated explicitly), you've obviously heard a song before. There are a couple of nice moments for the group, even some hint of Lance Bass's bass notes flavoring the chorus nicely (you're not going to be seeing Joey or Chris mentioned in this, so take that as it's presented), but again the production dates the whole thing heavily, blunting the impact. This one needs a cover by someone else in order to contextualize it properly.

11. "I'll Be Good For You" Something a little more in Justin's wheelhouse, maybe even a decent look-in to some of his solo work, probably not a surprise as he's a co-writer (along with several others including Teddy Pendergrass). It's got a slinky early Michael Jackson feel. It shoves the rest of the group into the background a little bit, but overall it's got some of the assuredness that rarely popped up after Track 2 above.

12. "I Thought She Knew" Some of these boy bands get knocked, almost always rightly, for being prepackaged pretty boys, studio creatures selected for their cheekbones and abs and their ability to make fuck-me eyes at a music video camera. This a capella piece serves to remind us that these five weirdos can actually sing together (there's ample evidence in promotional appearances now on YouTube if you wanna go see them singing at an aquarium or some shit). It's a tiny bit of a bummer that the album ends on a downer of a subject and a low-key presentation, but it's beautifully done and correctly showcases the virtuosity behind the vocal performances that otherwise have been lost on some '90s-as-fuck choices on some other tracks. Is this song as good as "Gone," a similar minimalist cut from their next album? Nope. But that's a stone-cold classic that didn't exist when this came out, so it's an ahistorical counterfactual and I'm embarrassed I even brought it up. But seriously go listen to that song, it's really good.

I guess in conclusion I could say something about life in a simpler time before 9/11, when Donald Trump was a gross joke we'd all more or less forgotten about. But I think we can all agree on the main takeaway: where the fuck is JC Chasez? That motherfucker can sing. Justin's great, a real talent and a charismatic performer, a multi-hyphenate wonderboy, blah blah blah. But go back to tracks 1, 2, and 6. JC had one solo album with some songs with terrible titles like "All Day Long I Dream About Sex," which, no, ew. Sigh. Maybe it's how we circle back to face the terrible present. Maybe we're not a people who deserve JC Chasez. Maybe the best we deserve is Ed Sheeran.