With what will soon amount to five albums in sixteen years, former boy band staple Justin Timberlake has never bothered to get very political, relying instead on those classic motifs that made the likes of Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson so “dreamy”: talk of love. Whether new love, love gone wrong or love of the past, JT has covered the gamut. And now, one supposes, wanting to adapt with the times/repent for starring in Wonder Wheel, Timberlake is showing us an entirely alternate–albeit entirely synthetic–side.
For as “progressive” and “open” to bowing down to women as Timberlake very desperately wants to seem, the lyrics of his latest single–only slightly more palatable than the first, “Filthy”–“Supplies” are in direct opposition to the message he claims to be peddling, one of female empowerment.
As we’re given the Dave Meyers video direction treatment, Timberlake sits in a dramatic apartment tableau with a series of screens in front of him projecting onto his glassy eyes images of everyone from Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump to protesters for women’s rights and the Black Lives Matter movement. Already, it’s getting dicey in the first fifteen seconds, as white men are notoriously tone deaf when it comes to commenting on a political landscape beyond the nineteenth century.
Deciding to venture out of his posh Downtown L.A. residence, Timberlake then encounters a woman all dressed in black amid a series of very literally white people–as in, they’re all painted white. Just when things are getting tense (or tense by Timberlake standards) between the woman and the albinos, he sings, “Saw you bein’ cornered by some guy you used to know/Stepped in between the both of y’all said ‘I’m leavin’, do you wanna go?'” As this lyric concludes, she punches out the man “bothering” her and takes Timberlake’s hand as they leave. It doesn’t exactly correspond with the visual motif Timberlake is trying to present in order to make up for the core of what his lyrics are saying: a woman still needs a man. No matter how futuristic and post-apocalyptic the setting. A setting of which is hit on the head like Ronnie Spector by Phil with the appearance of a pyramid intended to represent a combination of the illuminati and materialism (dollar bills, you know). It’s super deep because the woman is the one setting fire to it. She doesn’t need a male companion to perform any manual labor for her, formerly deemed to require the physical strength that only a man can possess. Timberlake, instead, offers himself in a sort of auxiliary role to the object of his affection, played by Eiza González Reyna (who you might also recognize from Baby Driver). Rather than asserting himself as the alpha, he presents himself as the catch-all net that you might find underneath a beginning trapeze artist, assuring, “I’ll be the light when you can’t see/I’ll be the wood when you need heat/I’ll be the generator, turn me on when you need heat.” On a side note, this “comfort” sounds, conceptually, a lot like the lyrics to “I’m A Little Teapot.”
And, again, to counteract the intent of his so-called “wokeness,” Reyna ends up mounting him for a piggyback ride anyway after blowing up the pyramid. Mixed metaphors continue as a woman wearing a “Pussy Grabs Back” t-shirt lifts the car Timberlake is perched atop. I guess she’s supposed to look capable and independent while doing this, but it rather just comes across as her being Timberlake’s lackey, elevating him in a more figurative sense. This faux attempt at trying to make his audience buy into his “self-accepted” “ancillary” role is shattered when he reverts to his heteronormative bullshit, depicting scenes of himself being intimate with Reyna (one can’t imagine Jessica Biel took this well) while grossly singing, “I’ll get my lighter, just fell out/Makes me a generous lover/Ooh, I wanna see everything.”
To add insult to injury, by the end, we’re right back to that white savior cliche, with Timberlake corralling “his” woman and children to accompany him into the abyss of a desolate Los Angeles (always desolate regardless of the circumstances). So even if the “intent” was there for Timberlake to express some au courant political awareness, we must just face it. As a man, everything you say is wrong, misguided and from a place that exhibits a total lack empathy and a complete surfeit of narcissism. Thank god Britney Spears got out when she did, and well before Timberlake had time to shade her about a Vegas residency. Though it seems his music career has already run out of the supplies that would have formerly helped him to evade this “retirement plan.”
