By now, anyone who has internet connection knows what Justin Timberlake said when a Sag Harbor officer pulled him over for driving while intoxicated in the Hamptons last week: “This is going to ruin the tour.” What tour? “The world tour!”
With that, the pop star birthed a catchphrase for the chronically online. (“This is going to ruin the tour,” I scolded my cat when he jumped on the counter the other day.) Timberlake was charged with one DWI and cited for two traffic violations – but did his arrest actually ruin anything?
Probably not. At least, that’s what I kept hearing at his Forget Tomorrow World Tour concert at Madison Square Garden Tuesday night.
“It happens,” said Arianna Calisto, a 26-year-old who came into Manhattan from Brooklyn to see Timberlake, whose music she “grew up with” (unlike the gen Z officer who pulled Timberlake over, allegedly unaware of who he was). Calisto’s friend made her a T-shirt emblazoned with Timberlake’s bleary-eyed mug shot and the caption “I’m bringing tipsy back”.
“He’s just a celebrity who got caught,” Calisto added. “I don’t think it’s necessary if he talks about it [onstage]. He’s a human.”
Timberlake did address the controversy over the weekend, during a tour stop at Chicago’s United Center. “It’s been a tough week,” he told fans in between songs. “I know sometimes I’m hard to love – but you keep on loving me, and I love you right back.”
The 43-year-old former boybander might have been referring to a litany of past actions that have come under scrutiny in recent years. Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me, released last year, depicted her famous ex as a cheater and the reason she got an abortion, and said he played guitar at her as she writhed on the floor in pain after the procedure.
Before the book’s release, in 2021 the New York Times dropped Framing Britney Spears, a documentary about her conservatorship that showed the double standard she faced after their breakup. Shortly after, Timberlake vaguely apologized to both Spears and Janet Jackson in a statement posted to Instagram, saying he was “deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right”. He also acknowledged he had “benefited from a system that condones misogyny and racism”.
Later that year, Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction got the New York Times documentary treatment too, re-examining the 2004 Super Bowl where Timberlake accidentally exposed her breast on live TV. The moment catapulted his career, but stifled hers.
Then, an about-face: this year, after the release of Spears’ memoir, Timberlake said that he’d “like to take this opportunity to apologize to absolutely fucking nobody”.
It was a snarky and self-satisfying response from a singer who had admitted to benefitting from misogyny and racism. (His R&B-tinged pop often feels appropriative of Black culture, perhaps summed up best by Prince’s reported 2006 dig at Timberlake: “For whoever is claiming they brought sexy back, sexy never left.”)
Anyone awaiting a Timberlake downfall saw last week’s DWI as comeuppance: the pop star was held overnight after running a stop sign and drifting out of a traffic line. (Timberlake claimed to only have had “one martini” before getting behind the wheel; he’s spoken about seeking help for excessive drinking in the past.) His next court date is scheduled for 26 July.
But the audience at the first of Timberlake’s two-night New York run came to party. Though the nearly 20,000-capacity venue wasn’t full, I wouldn’t say the turnout was embarrassing, either.
Women – and it was mostly women, some toting supportive boyfriends or husbands but mostly in groups of friends – came dressed in sequins, or vintage ‘NSync shirts, or both. MSG had the air of a bachelorette party, with lots of “woo”-ing and selfie-taking. Before Timberlake came on, a DJ spun 90s-baby favorites: think the Friends theme song and the Macarena.
Julie, Joy and Nina, three friends in from New Jersey who did not give their last names, said they were “fans since 1997” and no arrest could dull their adoration. “We got tickets months and months ago,” Julie said. “They’re blowing this way out of proportion. Give a guy a break! He’s exhausted, he has two kids, and his wife’s working. He can’t go out and have dinner?”
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Well, the dinner wasn’t the problem, it was the driving. Why not hire a driver? “He wants some alone time,” Julie said. “Sometimes you need to drive home and be alone with your thoughts.”
“I don’t care; no one got hurt,” said Michelle, who lives on Staten Island and didn’t give her last name because she called in sick from work to make the show. “It sucks, it’s embarrassing for him and his family, but that’s it. And next time he needs it, I’ll be his driver.”
Lexie Devito, mother of New York Giants quarterback Tommy Devito, was also in attendance, looking at the merch table when I approached her. She thought that Timberlake “should have been more careful”, and agreed that someone as famous as he is can afford to call an Uber when they’re inebriated. She added that her son has a driver “everywhere”.
When Timberlake took the stage, he started out strong, wisely scoring nostalgia points with aughts bangers such as Like I Love You, LoveStoned and Cry Me a River. His voice sounded strong, and his falsetto didn’t waver. He was putting on a good show.
But an extended midsection relied too heavily on current songs like Sanctified, a sort of Imagine Dragons-meets-gospel sleeper from Timberlake’s 2024 album Everything I Thought It Was. During the song, a woman who had been dancing in front of me for 30 straight minutes promptly sat down and busted out Bumble.
Jessica Biel, Timberlake’s wife of 12 years, showed up to support, standing alone in the VIP booth sipping on a cocktail. Martin Scorsese was in attendance, too, for some reason. Timberlake gave the director a shoutout, calling him a “homie” before performing New York, New York. Corny, yes, but a good way to show off his vocals. Though Timberlake didn’t address his DWI, the song choice and Scorsese mention seemed like an embrace of Manhattan and a rebuttal of the Hamptons, his arrest locale.
After the slow jams allowed the less dedicated among us to take bathroom, or Bumble, breaks, it was back to the hits. As SexyBack played, I looked up Janet Jackson tickets – she’s playing in Brooklyn next month, with seats in a comparable section to where I was for Timberlake going for $100 less. During the encore, where Timberlake stood on a mobile monolith that flew over the crowd, I wondered what kind of tour Britney Spears would have put on in 2024 if she hadn’t faced such debilitating career setbacks.
Did any of that matter, when I was sandwiched in between a trio of public school teachers celebrating summer, and a heavily pregnant woman who twerked her way through SexyBack? Moments like that save a tour from ruin.