Dashboard Confessional and Justin Timberlake Age Poorly

The return of the “TRL” generation could be an opportunity for honest reinvention. Instead, the artists rely on formulas and grand gestures.
Chris Carrabba no longer sings to an audience of one but to an entire cohort.Illustration by Amy Matsushita-Beal

Last summer, the emo-pop band Dashboard Confessional made an unexpected choice at the end of a live show in Central Park. All evening, it had performed its blockbuster singles, most of which are known for their pared-down, acoustic intimacy and the epic, agonized wail of the front man, Chris Carrabba. But Carrabba closed the set with an emotionally labored rendition of Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself,” from 2015, a master class in acoustic pop. The cover version illuminated how much Carrabba shares with the world of mainstream pop. But it also demonstrated what separates the band from its peers—in pop, emo, indie rock, and punk alike. Like Bieber, Carrabba has a knack for vocal melody, but the tone and the intensity of his version made the song anew. Bieber’s bratty lyrics were defanged, and the chorus—“If you like the way you look that much / Then, baby, you should go and love yourself”—was transformed from a kiss-off into an outpouring of pure reaction. Carrabba can mold any sentiment into totalizing torment without surrendering its sweetness.

In the past two decades, this ability has enabled Carrabba to cut a singular path. A child of punk rock who eventually found a calling as an emo-rock singer, in the late nineteen-nineties—more than a decade after emo’s genesis as a small, community-oriented scene, in Washington, D.C.—Carrabba became a poster child of the genre at a time when major record labels were realizing its commercial potential. Wholesome despite his full-arm tattoos, Carrabba was, in many ways, the perfect pop star: someone who made emotional pain sound like an aspirational state. His lyrics were eminently shoutable by crowds of thousands: “My hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me / So won’t you kill me / So I die happy,” he sings on “Hands Down,” from 2002, one of the band’s biggest hits.

During the aughts, Carrabba inched away from this hyper-specific torrent of inner dialogue, toggling between an intimate acoustic sound and something more like sweeping stadium rock. On the band’s new full-length album, “Crooked Shadows,” its first in nearly a decade, this transition is complete. Carrabba, rather than rely on the demons of his youth, uses his lyrics as a rallying cry for younger people who suffer from evergreen types of emotional distress. He no longer speaks to an imagined audience of one but to an entire generation. He is newly fond of the pronoun “we”: “We never learned to keep our voices down, no / We only learned to shout,” he sings, on “We Fight.”

For Carrabba, who is forty-two, despondence is now buttressed by an almost gospel-like optimism. “Ooh, we’re gonna be all right!” he tells his listeners, a stark turn from the man who, on the early hit “Saints and Sailors,” described himself as “a walking open wound, a trophy display of bruises.” Carrabba understands that a young person’s angst is as fleeting as it is potent, and he speaks as a figurehead for anguish rather than as a victim of it. Yet, even from this vantage, he remains true to the tenets of emo—that life is essentially terrible, and that every experience is rooted in a kind of emotionally stunted suffering and adversity that must be tackled. “There’s still a kid somewhere that needs to hear this, who’s tired of bleeding and battered and being torn up,” Carrabba announces, on “We Fight.”

Commitment to honoring emotional distress is one thing. Meaningful expression of those emotions is another, and Dashboard Confessional’s late-career music is less powerful than its early work, precisely because it comes from a place of remove. “Crooked Shadows” is as concise and earnest as Dashboard has ever been, but its sound has been flattened into a pop-rock haze, with Carrabba’s voice lower in the mix than on previous releases. “Crooked Shadows” will not do much for the Dashboard Confessional fan—or for the young teen who has never heard of the band but desperately craves its strain of emotional laceration.

For younger generations, emo is less a genre that speaks to a moment than a perennial force that generates waves of searing, confessional rock music. Because emo was never exactly cool, it has been insulated from the questions of relevance that squashed other niche types of music, such as indie rock and grunge. There is near-annual chatter about emo’s revival, in the form of older bands resurfacing, or of new generations of alt-rockers paying homage to the genre. Taylor Swift is a rabid Dashboard Confessional fan—and Carrabba could be cited as the inspiration for the emotional precision of her lyrics. The stigma of emo sincerity has long faded, so much so that today’s most exciting hip-hop and pop stars are explicitly calling on its sound. One man’s emotional turbulence may be fleeting, but emo is eternal.

Another early-aughts front man whose legacy has benefitted more from his prolonged absence than from his presence is Justin Timberlake, who returns to the spotlight this year, unwittingly alienated from today’s culture. Like Carrabba, Timberlake is a prominent ambassador of the era of MTV’s “TRL”; he is also one of the most successful graduates from the academy of boy bands. He launched his solo career, in 2002, with the album “Justified,” for which he and the producer Timbaland teamed up to create genre-bending pop songs that, despite their ugly, low-range squelch, made you want to dance. But Timberlake was not just a sonic innovator; he was also a harbinger of the ways in which hip-hop has overtaken the pop landscape, and of the ease with which white stars have co-opted hip-hop and R. & B.

But Timberlake’s new album, “Man of the Woods,” his fifth, fumbles awkwardly with the present. On its surface—and there is plenty of surface on this sixteen-song slog—it’s an attempt to reposition Timberlake as a soulful, salt-of-the-earth guy reconnecting with his Memphis roots. (“Act like the South ain’t the shit,” he taunts, on “Midnight Summer Jam,” as though Atlanta has not been widely accepted for a half decade as the most important city in music.) For someone hoping to boost the reputation of the South, Timberlake demonstrates only a cursory concept of what it can represent, lyrically and musically. Drained beer cans, twangy guitar, low whistles, flannel shirts, an elemental connection with nature and God, laments about work and bills—all are jammed into this record. The effect is a pop-identity hall of mirrors, and “Man of the Woods” is both the most bizarre and the dullest major pop record of this decade.

“Man of the Woods” could have been a fascinating, if not particularly commercial, concept album about a famous, talented man’s return to his birthplace. But Timberlake—who made the album with the guidance of Pharrell, another early-aughts star who has persisted into this decade—cannot seem to stick to his conceit. One moment, he’s a carefree party instigator with a dirty mouth; the next, he’s a downtrodden Southerner who’s behind on his bills. He’s a weathered sage addressing his young son, then he’s a guy with no finer point to make than “Success is cool / Money is fine / But you’re special.”

The production is not much more focussed: Timberlake is both a one-man barbershop quartet and a neo-funk Frankenstein. Despite all of his attempts at cross-genre noodling, the best song on the album is the most straightforward attempt at country music, “Say Something,” which finds Timberlake playing backup for Chris Stapleton.

It’s not difficult to understand why Timberlake made a record like this. Aging pop stars must navigate the challenge of maintaining relevance while avoiding desperation. They also strain to capture the attention of listeners who are barraged with innovation. An artist like Timberlake, for better or for worse, must aspire to high art and grand gestures. These, of course, are harder to pull off than they appear. Artistic vision cannot be faked, which is an unfortunate reality that Timberlake has been able to elide until now. ♦