Pop music is notoriously a young person’s game. It can be hard to stay relevant long-term in an industry obsessed with the newest and hottest thing. Still, early 2000s icons Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lopez recently released new albums and went on big-budget tours to promote them. But are fans interested in the new material?
Timberlake’s new album, Everything I Thought It Was, came out on March 15. Some tracks on it, like “Selfish,” sound like a great pop song with a sophisticated melody and singing, says Variety’s Jem Aswad, who recently wrote about aging pop stars and their relationship with new music.
The rest of the album? “The lyrics are so shockingly bad, in such a ham-fisted attempt at sexy lyrics that I think the Daily Telegraph in England called him ‘pop’s embarrassing uncle,’” says Aswad.
He continues, “Musically, it's like he was trying to fit into an outfit that he fit into in his early 30s. And it looks okay, but it's just not really right.”
Meanwhile, Aswad also describes Lopez’s latest album, This is Me … Now, and its accompanying film and tour, as generic.
“I hear so many songs like that every single week, and they don't really stand out from each other. … She was always multi-platform, if you will, but it's not like she was ever a world-class singer,” he says.
However, some pop stars have found success decades into their career, including Cher’s chart-topping 1998 hit “Believe” and Kylie Minogue’s viral bop “Padam Padam.”
However, Aswad posits that they’re flukes.
“People heard ‘Believe’ when it came out. The record label said this actually could be a major hit, and they were right. It was a huge global hit, very late in Cher’s career. The Kylie song, that was a bit more of a surprise, but it was very well-targeted. Kylie knows her audience. And I went to a listening session at, quite frankly, a gay club in the West Village. And that was her audience, quite frankly, or most of it anyway. But you also had a very accessible hit that I'm not surprised was as big as it was. Now, how do they follow that? That's the tough part.”
