31 August 2006
In what’s surely a salutary lesson to social media managers everywhere, the most viral pop-cultural catchphrase of 2006 turned out to be the unlikely “I’m bringing sexy back”. Its blend of total conviction, wilful meaninglessness and the bantz trigger-word ‘sexy’ just seemed to hit a sweet spot, at least with radio DJs and TV comedians. At the time, I was teaching English to adults in France, where the home-grown music marketplace values serious, poetic lyrics far above the grubby, trivial business of catchy tunes. The day I explained to my class of Parisian asset managers that the words of English-language chart hits often don’t mean anything at all, I knew I had lost the room; ‘it just sounds cool’ was not an admissible defence in the French revolutionary pop courts.
Total conviction and ‘it just sounds cool’ are mission statements for ‘SexyBack’, of course. Strangely—or, depending on your degree of world-weary cynicism, predictably—this is only our first Irish number one to feature the work of Timbaland, who since the start of the ’00s had been creating a fresh new electro-R&B sound with his regular collaborator Missy Elliott; their partnership was the US chapter of the ’00s pop golden age. Alas, something as weird and wonderful as Missy’s ‘Get Ur Freak On’ barely made the Irish top 30. By the middle of the decade, though, Timbaland was a big-budget producer for hire, providing fashionable dancefloor cred to mainstream chart pop stars like Nelly Furtado and here Justin Timberlake. Nothing wrong with that: Nelly Furtado’s reinvention hits like ‘Maneater’ are a blast. ‘SexyBack’ too is a grinding, compelling bop. And begrudging fair play to Timberlake: as well as this being a new sound for him too, he had the smarts to see out this thing’s harsh, unrelenting techno-static groove right to the end rather than shoehorn in a radio-friendly soulful mid-section or what have you.
Granted, there isn’t much else to ‘SexyBack’ than that catchphrase and that insistent chorus (the equally meaning-resistant “Go ahead be gone with it”) plus Timbaland’s interjections of “take it to the chorus!” and the like feel painfully like filler. No matter: it just sounds cool. Number one in France in September 2006, I should add, was Johnny Hallyday.
