Nelly featuring Justin Timberlake 'Work It'

Chart Peak: 7
YouTube

Back when I started this album in November 2015, you might recall that Justin Timberlake and Nelly were right next to each other as tracks 2 and 3 on Disc One, with tracks that were the Top 2 singles for a week in 2002. Here at the exact midpoint of Disc Two, they're even closer together on the same record and in a moderately entertaining coincidence, this entered at 7 in a week when Timberlake had a solo hit at 8. It was a week when we were looking to see whether Eminem would manage the rare-at-the-time feat of two simultaneous Top 10 singles: he didn't but Timberlake managed to sneak in almost unnoticed.

Funny that the subjects of "moderately entertaining" and "almost unnoticed" have cropped up because they pretty much define this track, which at best does exactly what you'd expect. It wasn't their first time together as Nelly also guested on late N-Sync hit 'Girlfriend' and he carved out a big niche for himself as a rapper either unconcerned with being credible or unaware that he wasn't, and thus willing to front pop/dance oriented tracks his peers might consider a sellout. That's probably why his career has never entirely recovered from the emergence of Flo Rida, but that's another story.

Here in 2003 both were doubtless only too happy to add to their hits with this rather by-numbers collaboration, although in the event this didn't do much in the US (it was outcharted there by the unappealingly-titled follow-up 'Pimp Juice'). They probably even enjoyed going to the Playboy Mansion to film the video, and as far as I'm concerned they're welcome to that. Some people were apparently impressed by a remix which plays the vocals over the riff from 'Back In Black' by AC/DC though this was inevitably denied commercial release. And I'm not sure it's even in time but I can't say I blame Jason Nevins for being reluctant to listen to the original track often.

Nelly also appears on: Now 47, 49 [with City Spud], 52, 59, 60 [with Tim McGraw], 61, 77, 85, 95 [with Cash Cash & Digital Farm Animals]
Justin Timberlake also appears on: Now 55, 56, 57, 65, 66, 67, 85, 94
Available on: Nellyville

Justin Timberlake 'Like I Love You'

Chart Peak: 2
YouTube

Justin's first solo project followed on from *NSYNC's 'Girlfriend' collaboration with Nelly & The Neptunes... He co-wrote a lot of the R'N'B/ hip-hop influenced album which produced this massive No. 2 single 'Like I Love You' in Autumn 2002.

I don't want to boast or anything but I was one of the first few million people to hear this record. At least, I remember hearing the airplay premiere of it on the Radio 1 breakfast show,and it was explained that due to time difference,the track wouldn't be played on US radio until five hours later in order to get the breakfast audience over there. I don't think they'd do it that way any more.
It's tempting to go on and say "little did we know how big a star he was going to become", or conversely to boast about how I immediately knew this would be massive. Actually the truth is somewhere in between: allowing for the rather patchy success of Nsync in the UK, the people at Radio 1 and whatever other British radio stations took part in the premiere had obviously heard the track in advance and anticipated it would be more than a typical spin-off single by an ex-boyband singer. I don't recall the same level of fuss around the solo work of JC Chasez.

I can't really remember what I actually thought of 'Like I Love You' that first time, though it would have been filtered through my own predjudices about its origins (which I still stand by because *NSYNC weren't any good) and my lack of enthusiasm for the work of Robbie Williams and Ronan Keating, the top ex-boyband stars of the time. It didn't take me long to reach roughly the view I still take, which is that it's a decent piece of songwriting and I have to appreciate anyone in the 21st century advising somebody to "be limber". However, what really makes it is the Neptunes production with those massed ranks of acoustic guitars which some critics at the time pointed out was largely recycled from their work on 'Pass The Courvoisier Part 2' for Busta Rhymes. Still it finds its best expression here and for at least half its running time this is a truly impressive record. Things start to go a bit wrong with the tacky rap verse performed by vaguely-famous-at-the-time duo Clipse [though they don't seem to have written it] and when Timberlake come back off that by singing "I just wanna love you baby" in a showy falsetto it starts to teeter on the precipice of its own confidence, finally tumbling over with the breathy spoken section at the end which becomes risible in its earnestness. I think that section my even have been cut from the initial radio edit but it's present here and on every other commercial release of the song I've found. Luckily that firt half of the song is good enough for me to forgive it most of the time. I can even forgive him calling the album Justified.

Also appearing on: Now 55, 56, 57, 65, 66, 67, 85
Available on: 30 Stars: 2000s [Clean]

*NSync 'Bye Bye Bye'

Chart Peak: 3

YouTube

Vocal quintet *NSync, AKA Lance, JC, Joey, Chris and Justin, are big news in their native America - the band's eponymous debut album sold over ten million copies in the States and yielded four US No1 singles!... Following the No3 success of 'Bye Bye Bye', their biggest UK hit to date, the boys look set to conquer the UK pop scene too.

This group's name seems to be spelt various different ways, so (as with some other odd typography on this album) I've followed the sleeve credit. Whilst this was indeed their first Now! appearance, I'm not entirely sure they needed this much of an introduction: they'd scored two Top 10 hits in 1999, both re-releases of singles that had originally been released as early as 1997. At this point if you didn't know who they were you probably didn't care. Consistent success was always hard for them to come by on this side of the Atlantic where they always seemed overshadowed by the Backstreet Boys: indeed founding member Chris Kirkpatrick was a rejected Backstreet Boy, who persuaded that group's manager to let him form a spin-off act. Funnily enough, it was *NSync who seemed to have the bigger success in their homeland, whilst only German-speaking European countries seemed to have enough appetite for both acts to be massive at the same time.
By this point, both groups had fallen out with the manager, and in *NSync's case with the record company too, so the titles of this single and its parent album No Strings Attached were openly intended as references to their pleasure at successfully suing their way out of both associations. The song itself of course makes no direct reference to these events, recasting the song in the typical boy-girl context their fans would understand. There are some signs of a harder-edged approach on this than on some of their previous hits, though not to anything like the extent they claimed up at the time, and it's a far cry from the complexity of Timbaland and some other producers of the time. In fact of all the tracks so far on this album the one it most closely resembles is probably 'Day And Night', which shares that insistent emphasis on the title lyric and little else in the verses and chorus.

Oh, and in case you didn't know, that "Justin" who's the last member named in the sleeve note is the now immensely famous Justin Timberlake.

Also appearing on: Now 47, 52
Available on: Greatest Hits

Justin Timberlake 'What Goes Around... Comes Around'

Chart Peak: 4

YouTube

JT scored a Top 10 hit with the "beautiful yet haunting" single 'What Goes Around Comes Around' in February 2007... The epic music video for the track stars Hollywood siren Scarlett Johansson and features a nine-minute long director's cut which even has film credits!

Before the Bank Holiday break I was crediting Take That for their strategy, and Timberlake is another act who has done well on that score. In the ten years he's been a solo artist, he's released only two albums but not only have those both been massive sellers, he's created such demand for his work that every guest spot he does on somebody else's record turns into a major event and usually a major hit too.

This present track was the third single from the painfully-titled second album FutureSex/LoveSounds, and you were wondering why the ellipsis in the title, which makes it look like he thinks the "comes around" part is a surprising and amusing punchline, rather than the utterly conventional cliché it is. It transpires that 'Comes Around' is an "interlude" in the album version which has been excised from this single edit, though it still goes on for five minutes even in this form. The song is a big string-laden ballad which openly rehashes elements of his earlier big hit 'Cry Me A River', to the extent that I sometimes struggle to remember which lines are from which of the songs. Strangely, I find this one preferable to the original, because I like the melody slightly more and the production is better, but well-done as it is it doesn't greatly change my perception of Timberlake as the successor to Mick Hucknall - a man who has genuine talent but overshadows it with his arrogance and smarm. They are of course both going to cry all the way to the bank if they read this.

Also appearing on: Now 54, 55, 56, 57, 65, 67
Available on: R&B Love Songs 2010 [Explicit]