Where ultra pop met R&B met funk met hip hop's leading dj luminary.
Round 4
Genre - Pop
Artist - Justin Timberlake ft. Timbaland
Song - SexyBack
Pop is dead. The monoculture has passed. This has been so since the dissolution and irrelevance of TRL, monoculture and pop's last gasp (I will explain this to the Squibbles when they ask about this century's pop music). With everything in tatters, this song blew off from in from nowhere in 2006 to become a #1 hit on Billboard's Hot 100 for seven weeks straight. With pop essentially dying and fragmenting into millions of choices on either one's personal device or computer, Timbaland's production -- a bit of James Brown mixed with blue-eyed soul, heavy on the funk -- dominated whatever was left of pop's apocalypse and was a wonder of a produced and sung item, blowing up on radio stations everywhere.
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From Timberlake on Wiki: He described "SexyBack" as "an experiment gone right from the sort of synthesizer influence to the distorted vocals", adding that it was "one of the songs that the more you listen to it its just hook after hook after hook. It's just one of those 'flow off the top of your head' tracks, in terms of melody. We wanted to keep it loose and not too rehearsed, it's one of those very experimental records though." Timberlake revealed that he went "left", regarding going more rock, not in how he developed the song, but in the way he sang the song. "I wanted to sing the song like a rock and roll singer, not an R&B singer. That's the approach." The day before recording, Timberlake and Timbaland had listened to David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" and the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers".
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No accident those influences would resonate with me, and I'd get to tell the Squibbles about my favorite dance song probably ever, which is "House of Jealous Lovers". I'd also get to tell them about aughts dance/punk culture, one of my favorite subcultures of all-time, something that ruled the early aughts for me. It's my version of when pop when it had its last gasp at anything close to monoculture and when punk had any sort of personal relevance, one thing which had been dying since cable dominated the television market in the '80s, the other as I got older.