The backlash over Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl halftime show, explained

Over the weekend, it was announced that the singer whose most famous recent work is the song “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from the Trolls motion picture soundtrack will be performing at one of America’s biggest televised concert events: Justin Timberlake tweeted on Sunday that he will headline the halftime show at Super Bowl 52 on February 4, 2018, in Minneapolis.

Even if you don’t like Timberlake’s musical style, it’s hard to deny that the former ‘NSYNC frontman is a good performer. He can dance, sing, and dance and sing at the same time — all pretty well. (Those in doubt should check out the 2016 Netflix concert documentary Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids.) His performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, where he received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award, is considered one of the best in the award show’s history, not only for the performance itself but for its reminder of just how many indelible pop songs Timberlake has had a hand in creating.

So it stands to reason that Timberlake is capable of putting on a great show at the Super Bowl.

But no matter how good any given musician or pop superstar is, Super Bowl halftime performers are polarizing. Some people may have expected Lady Gaga, the 2017 headliner, to make an aggressive political statement post-election — but many critics predicted that she would put on a safer show, and that turned out to be true. When gentle, inoffensive Coldplay was chosen as the 2016 Super Bowl halftime act, lots of folks were immediately disappointed by the implied lack of spectacle. And when Katy Perry was selected to perform in 2015, some saw the choice as boring and basic, while others saw it as the NFL signaling that it’s okay with cultural appropriation; in the end, a dancing shark stole the show.

Now Timberlake’s announcement is facing backlash too. There’s a petition to rescind his Super Bowl invite, as well as a Twitter hashtag demanding that he not be allowed to perform.

But it’s not because people are fed up with the NFL choosing safe, nonpolitical performers, or because they aren’t fans of his music. Instead, it stems from Timberlake’s behavior the last time he graced the stage of the Super Bowl halftime show — alongside Janet Jackson in 2004 — and how that performance and its infamous “wardrobe malfunction” changed (or didn’t change) both entertainers’ careers.

After the “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl, Janet Jackson’s career was damaged. But Timberlake’s ultimately thrived.
Thirteen years ago, two career paths diverged on the stage of the Super Bowl 38 halftime show: those of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake.

P. Diddy, Nelly, and Kid Rock were also part of that show, but the only two performers anyone remembers are Timberlake and Jackson, and how their actions brought the terms “wardrobe malfunction” and “nipplegate” into America’s common parlance.

As part of the halftime show, and because the two shared a working relationship — Timberlake’s former boy band ‘NSYNC had opened for Jackson’s Velvet Rope Tour in the late ’90s — Jackson, the headliner, invited Timberlake to join the halftime show as a surprise guest, and the two closed out the set with a duet of Timberlake’s song “Rock Your Body”, off his debut solo album Justified. The performance ended with Timberlake ripping off a piece of Jackson’s costume to coincide with the lyric “have you naked by the end of this song”; in the process, Jackson’s right breast was revealed on live television, her nipple adorned with a sun-shaped ring.

The moment resulted in a $550,000 fine from the Federal Communications Commission against Jackson and CBS (which aired that year’s game). A court would eventually rule that the FCC’s fine was wrongly imposed, but even if it had been upheld, it would have been minuscule in comparison to the damage it did to Jackson’s career.

Following the incident, which amounted to 9/16ths of a second of a naked breast on air, people were outraged that the NFL had shown nudity and exposed its massive audience to indecency. The NFL clearly wanted to blame someone for the reportedly 200,000-plus complaints fielded by the FCC in response.

According to Rolling Stone, the organization pointed its finger at MTV, which produced the halftime show, as well as MTV’s parent company, Viacom, and declared that MTV would never produce another halftime show again. MTV and Viacom then passed the blame to Jackson.

“Janet Jackson engineered it”, Tom Freston, chief executive for MTV at the time, told Reuters in an interview.

Viacom then followed up by punitively blacklisting Jackson’s music videos from airing on its networks and her songs from being played on Viacom-owned radio stations. As Rolling Stone reported in a comprehensive timeline of the incident and its extended fallout:

CBS and MTV’s parent company Viacom, angered that an unannounced addition to the Super Bowl performance has now cost them all future halftime shows, hits back at Jackson by essentially blacklisting her, keeping her music videos off their properties MTV, VH1, and radio stations under their umbrella. The blacklist spreads to include non-Viacom media entities as well.
Rolling Stone also reported that CBS rescinded Jackson’s invitation to present at the 46th Annual Grammy Awards, and People reported that she was pressured into completely skipping the ceremony, which took place one week after the Super Bowl, on February 8, 2004. However, Timberlake was allowed to attend, and won the award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and Best Pop Vocal Album.

Usually Super Bowl halftime performances are a boon for artists. Because people now consume so much music via streaming, it’s hard to gauge the effect that recent Super Bowl halftime shows have had on their headliners’ album sales, let alone compare it to past years when streaming didn’t exist. But a 2015 analysis from Billboard found that 2014 Super Bowl performer Bruno Mars and, to a lesser extent, 2012 performer Beyoncé saw a spike in their respective music consumption after their halftime shows. And in 2016, Reuters reported that 2015 performer Katy Perry saw a massive boost.

“Despite no new album or U.S. tour last year, sales of Perry’s existing work surged 92 percent in the week after her performance. YouTube videos of Perry’s halftime show racked up views in the millions”, Reuters explained.

Before the advent of streaming, Shania Twain’s 2002 album Up enjoyed a 41 percent boost in sales (around 67,000 copies) after she performed at the 2003 Super Bowl halftime show, according to Billboard.

But because of her “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004, Jackson didn’t get the same kind of bump.

Because of Viacom’s blacklist, Jackson’s post-Super Bowl album Damita Jo — released a month after the game, in March — didn’t get the radio promotion and airplay it would’ve otherwise had. Commercially, the album eventually garnered a platinum certification (1 million units sold) in the United States. But those sales are drastically lower than those of her previous albums, All For You and The Velvet Rope, which were certified two times and three times platinum by the Record Industry Association of America.

The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary R&B Album, but it’s largely seen as a casualty of the Super Bowl fallout that never got a fair shake. Wesley Morris, writing for the New York Times in 2016, surmised that the album “remains underrated as a result”.

But while all this was happening to Jackson, Timberlake didn’t receive the same kind of scrutiny or blame. After winning his Grammy and briefly apologizing in his acceptance speech (“What occurred was unintentional, completely regrettable, and I apologize if you guys were offended”), Timberlake retreated from the public eye for a while. His next album, Futuresex/Lovesounds, was released two years later, in 2006, to critical acclaim and praise. Meanwhile, Jackson also released an album that year, 20 y.o., amid reports of a lingering MTV blacklist against the first single from the album, “Call on Me”.

Looking back now, for an act that involved two people and Timberlake literally ripping off a piece of Jackson’s clothing, it’s easy to see how unfairly Jackson was treated. Her subsequent work was kneecapped, while Timberlake’s was not.

Timberlake avoided taking responsibility for what happened, allowing Jackson to shoulder the blame
The lesson of “nipplegate” is that in its aftermath, no one wanted to take responsibility for it. This includes Timberlake — who, as outrage began to snowball, changed his account of what happened.

Rich Juzwiak, writing for Gawker in 2014, outlined Timberlake’s varying responses clearly. On the night of the Super Bowl, the performer implied to Access Hollywood that he and Jackson had knowingly given the Super Bowl audience something that would get people talking:

He cheerfully described the show for co-hosts Pat O’Brien and Nancy O’Dell: “It was fun. It was quick, slick, to the point”.

“You guys were getting pretty hot and steamy up there”, O’Brien pointed out to Timberlake.

“Hey man, we love giving you all something to talk about”, Timberlake laughed.
Juzwiak notes Timberlake started to change his tune a few hours later, introducing the word “regrettable” and the phrase “not intentional”. Then a few days later, Timberlake suggested to KCBS that he was an innocent victim of whatever had happened during the halftime show:

The fact of the matter is, I’ve had a good year, a really good year, especially with my music, even me personally. I don’t feel like I need publicity like this. And I wouldn’t want to be involved with a stunt, especially of this magnitude. I immediately looked at her, they brought a towel up onstage, I immediately covered her up. I was completely embarrassed, just walked off the stage as quick as I could.
Timberlake’s answers created the narrative that it was somehow a shock and surprise to him that he was performing choreography that would end with him ripping off Jackson’s bodice while singing the lyric “have you naked by the end of this song”.

And a decade and some change later, it seems clear that the outrage changed Timberlake’s response, in an attempt to wriggle himself free of any responsibility.

Jackson’s response to the controversy was completely different.

In a written statement published February 2, the day after the show, she said that MTV, CBS, and the NFL had no knowledge of her “costume reveal” — or her costume reveal gone wrong, depending on whom you believe.

“The decision to have a costume reveal at the end of my halftime show performance was made after final rehearsals”, she said — the real reveal, according to Jackson, was supposed to unveil a red lace bra. “MTV was completely unaware of it. It was not my intention that it go as far as it did. I apologize to anyone offended — including the audience, MTV, CBS and the NFL”.

It wasn’t until three years later that Timberlake publicly reflected on his immediate response to the controversy, when he expressed regret for not shouldering some of the blame or defending Jackson, while also apparently condemning society for mistreating “ethnic people”:

“In my honest opinion now … I could’ve handled it better”, Timberlake told MTV in 2007. “I probably got 10 percent of the blame, and that says something about society. I think that America’s harsher on women … And I think that America is, you know, unfairly harsh on ethnic people”.

In that statement, Timberlake seemed to have conveniently forgotten that he’d had a hand in letting Jackson bear the brunt of the outrage. It’s not like both he and Jackson offered themselves up equally and people only decided to pick on Jackson; it was only after damage had been done to Jackson’s career, and after Timberlake had released a successful album, that he found his voice to speak up.

In 2009, Timberlake offered another apology.

“I wish I had supported Janet more. I am not sorry I apologized, but I wish I had been there more for Janet”, he told Entertainment Weekly.

Justin Timberlake’s image is one of being a “nice guy”, but his actions have shown that isn’t always the case
The way Timberlake presents himself and the way he’s acted haven’t always matched up.

Timberlake is a musical superstar who has generally maintained a squeaky-clean, nice-guy persona. That persona originated with his role as a child cast member of the Mickey Mouse Club, continued throughout his time as part of the singing teenage dream known as ‘NSYNC, and has extended into his solo career.

He’s the good guy who gets cheated on in songs like ‘NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” and his solo hits “Cry Me a River” and “What Goes Around Comes Around”. He’s heartbroken and vulnerable in songs like “Gone”. Even when he’s singing about sex, on tracks like “Sexyback” or “Rock Your Body” or “Señorita”, the act is almost always couched in “dancing” sexily; the raunchiest things ever get is via dance floor frottage.

But there’s something less nice in the way he presented and marketed those songs.

Long before his and Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, from 1999 to 2002, Timberlake was one half of the most mythical pairing in pop music history. That’s when he was dating fellow pop icon Britney Spears, and depending on your cynicism regarding celebrity culture, Spears and Timberlake were either truly in sweet, sweet love, or they simply profited off a shrewdly sold story of being truly in sweet, sweet love. (I’d wager that your age when the two were together is also a factor in your opinion of this.)

In 2002, a few months after the couple broke up, Timberlake released Justified — and used their split and seemingly private details about their relationship to sell his album. He hired an actress who looked like Britney Spears to appear in his video for “Cry Me a River” — alleging (and seemingly confirming) that Spears had cheated on him, though in interviews promoting the song and album he had talked about promising to keep their relationship private and respectful. And in interviews, he denied that the Spears lookalike in the video was intended to send a message about his ex.

“The video is not about her. The video is about me”, he told Us Weekly.

There’s also the 2002 interview Timberlake did with Barbara Walters, during which she asked him about Britney Spears’s virginity and whether they remained chaste in their relationship; in response, Timberlake laughed at the camera while flippantly saying, “Sure”.

Timberlake’s actions were much pettier than he’d made himself out to be. The nice guy in his songs wouldn’t be the type of person to talk about an ex’s virginity or air their dirty laundry to further his career.

And when it comes to Janet Jackson, the incongruence continues. Timberlake has often cited how much of an inspiration her brother Michael Jackson was to him — in one 2014 interview, Timberlake said he owed his entire solo career to Michael Jackson — but when he had the chance to defend Janet Jackson and speak up against her unfair treatment after the Super Bowl, he remained largely silent, even complicit with the way she was turned into a scapegoat.

Timberlake’s apology for “nipplegate” came years after the incident — not when Jackson could’ve actually used the support. And in the harsh light of 2017, it’s a lot clearer that Timberlake should have treated Jackson better in 2004.

Most recently, Timberlake got himself into some Twitter trouble last year when he tweeted support of a Jesse Williams speech at the BET awards in which Williams spoke about respecting black women, but then chided another person tweeting who reminded him of his treatment of Janet Jackson.

“[I]t’s still damning that Timberlake will be rewarded after he was never punished in the first place”, Ira Madison III wrote for the Daily Beast in September, when the rumors of Timberlake being a frontrunner for the 2018 Super Bowl halftime show first surfaced. “My only hope is that as Timberlake attempts to return to the Super Bowl arena, he’ll be forced to reckon with the sins of his past”.

Who knows, perhaps Timberlake will do something audacious and defiant and invite Jackson back to the Super Bowl halftime stage. Not that Jackson would or even should say yes — she’s currently performing in her well-received State of the World Tour. (Timberlake, meanwhile, can next be seen starring in Woody Allen’s new movie Wonder Wheel, will come out against the backdrop of a national conversation about sex abuse in Hollywood.)

But no matter what Timberlake does during the halftime show on February 4, or how good his performance is, it won’t be enough to make up for what we he didn’t do the last time he performed at the Super Bowl.

Vox