Meet Justin. He is a 21-year-old white boy from down South, with blue eyes and curly hair he can’t figure out how to style yet. He loves basketball and golf, Michael Jordan, Halo on his Xbox, fast cars, weed, and women. He calls his mom every day and tells her everything, even things about sex she doesn’t want to hear. He is not religious, despite being raised in a Memphis Baptist church, but he has a strong sense of “spirituality,” by which he means he lights a candle at the end of a long day. His sense of humor is ribald, flirtatious; he says he doesn’t really masturbate, mostly because he’s a perfectionist, and is sex with yourself the best you can do? Most of all, he loves music. He listens to Elvis and Donny Hathaway, Eminem and Coldplay, Al Green and his idol, Stevie Wonder; he claims, with confidence, that “real consumers” don’t care about genres.
Actually, you’ve already met Justin. He’s one-fifth of the most popular boy band in the United States, if not the world. This band sells millions (and millions) of records, is all over pop radio and sometimes what the industry calls “urban” stations, and holds the hearts of a militant demographic: girls under the age of 18. Justin is considered the cutest, the most talented; he is allowed to beatbox during their concerts. What the band does is not respectable at this point in time, but they do have power. Three years ago, when Justin was just 18, the band engaged in a vicious, victorious legal battle with their financial backer, who was making profits beyond his entitlement. From that, Justin took an important lesson: Be in control of your product—yourself. Be the one who’s getting the checks. Do not be the sucker who is exploited for doing what he loves.
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Like the woman who publicly broke his heart weeks after he turned 21, Justin is in an interesting transitional moment. He’s not a boy, not yet a man, with expectations to subvert and fulfill. For his ex-girlfriend, that in-between state is confusing terrain; despite (or because of) her superstardom, she often seems lost, albeit glamorously. For boys, it will always be different. All of the above—the girls, the looks, the attitude, the voice—means Justin is being given a gift as he enters adulthood: his chance. He’ll get a lot of chances, as it turns out, but in 2002 here’s what that means. He finally gets to show the world who he is—and how much money that can make.
Years later, when Justin tells a story on Hot Ones about how Marilyn Manson called Justified, his debut solo album, a work of genius, he sounds like an aging star exaggerating, misremembering some ass-kissing as genuine praise. But that anecdote does describe how Justified felt at the time. By the end of 2003, most people, even cool ones like André 3000, agreed that the solo project from the cutest boy in *NSYNC was actually kind of great. Also, he was no longer cute—he was hot. And the singles were little monsters, catching hold and not letting go. (Chino Moreno from Deftones, to SPIN magazine: “I listen to [Justified] every day!”) Millions of copies and two successful concert tours later, with a beautiful movie star girlfriend to boot, Justin had a remit by his 23rd birthday to be the new prince of pop, and he would oblige us for the decade to come, putting his proverbial dick in a box for the world to open.
