From boy band to world domination

JUSTIN Timberlake is America’s biggest male pop star. I realised this for the first time the other day. It hit me during the final leg of Timberlake’s dizzying campaign to promote The 20/20 Experience, his first LP in nearly seven years, which came out Mar 19. He’d just hosted Saturday Night Live and was about to begin a week-long stint on Jimmy Fallon; at that point I half-expected him to burst forth from my recycling bin with a winning smile and stack of CDs under his arm.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to size up Timberlake’s stardom. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna are bigger, of course, but they are very much not boys. Usher is a bore these days. Bruno Mars could evaporate at any moment. And Justin Bieber is still trapped in Tiger Beat territory. Timberlake is all we have.

And yet for some reason we have been slow to acknowledge his place in the pop cosmos — not just me, but the culture at large. Most of the talk about Timberlake still centres on his improbable transformation from *N Sync puff pastry-tight blond curls, paint-splattered jeans, matching diamond studs — to a credible, grown-up R&B artist. But the metamorphosis itself is old news. What hasn’t been adequately examined is the position he now occupies as our era’s equivalent of a Michael Jackson or an Elvis Presley, as strange as that sounds.