Make Love in My Car | Episode 4: Riding in Cars with White Men Who Don’t Care About Me

Make Love In My Car is a regular music column by Kendra Allen. The name of the column is a reference to the song “Make Out in My Car” by Moses Sumney. The slight change in meaning is intended to amplify the camaraderie, comedy, and closeness of riding in a car with a great playlist, whether alone or with someone else. In this episode, she writes about boy bands, Justin Timberlake, and feeling betrayed by an artist you love.

When I take the next exit, it’s not because it’s mine. Nor is it a matter of car trouble. I’m just three tracks into Justin Timberlake’s 2013 comeback album, The 20/20 Experience. I’m less than thirty seconds into the song, and once the beat shifts, I pull over onto the road’s shoulder, glide past the slew of establishments to my right. An Auto Zone. A Chuck E. Cheese. A Wendy’s. Across the intersection, there’s an IHOP. A Furr’s, a Walmart, a lane to merge back onto 635, and incoming, post-work traffic stacked like sardines on all four sides. And I sit there with my bottom lip touching my chin. I could’ve picked a less busy place to park. Like home. But my hands have lost the ability to stay on the wheel. They don’t ask me if one of them should rest on top of my head, or if the tips of my fingers dangling in and out of my open mouth is warranted—they do what they want, regardless of my consent. I take all eight digits out of my mouth and sink them into my cheeks, drag down my face, and moan as if someone slowly pulled a knife from my gut. I stop asking myself whether I’m sweating because I’m no longer moving and creating wind (seeing as how my car don’t got no air conditioning) or if it’s because I keep rewinding the beginning of “Don’t Hold The Wall.”
Either way.
It’s Tuesday—the day albums used to come out—and I spend all day at school and work anticipating listening. Buying albums on the day they release is a big part of my identity at this point. I’ve made myself believe if I don’t have a physical copy of an album by an artist I follow as soon as it drops, I’m not a real fan. It’s a weird, weird phase. And Justin’s been MIA a long, long time. Anyways, I’m working my first teenage job at a local photography studio and I’m lucky. Super lucky. I get to spend six hours on weekends assisting the conveyor belt of children coming in to take their senior photos. On weekdays I spend about four hours a day cropping/printing school ID badges and making sure the correct name/school/desired photo packages are going to the correct places at the correct times. It’s the perfect job, with the perfect people—a family setting where the owners have made room for me based on me being funny. The fact I’m in the photography cluster at my high school and tend to carry a camera everywhere is a bonus.
The day The 20/20 Experience comes out, I tell the woman I work closest with that I’ma have to go so I can get to Target before they close. She starts to chuckle at my assertiveness, but I know she gone let me even though she would prefer me to stick around and talk with her about Scandal.
“What you need to get at Target that’s so important?”
I laugh back at her cause we both sense the senselessness of my pending answer.
“A CD, Ms. Perry! Keep up!!”
“What CD?”
I hold back for a second. “ . . . Justin . . . Timberlake.”
“Chile . . . I know you lying.” She roll her eyes. “But gon’ head.”

To say I’ve been a fan of Justin Timberlake for twenty of the twenty-seven years of my life would not be a reach. Like most girls growing up in the early 2000s, I went through a very dramatic, all-consuming boy band stage. From four to fourteen years old, I jumped in and out of several fan bases depending on who I thought made the best music. The B2Ks, 112s, Day26s, Hot Boy$, Soul For Reals, Jonas Brothers, and Pretty Rickys of the world. NSYNC just happened to be the first.
The height of NSYNC—not professionally but for my personal life story—was their Celebrity album. If I ever allowed you to know me—especially between the ages previously mentioned—you’d know I’m a pop girl. A mainstream music lover. Don’t let me try to convince you that I’m not. In the year of 2002, I made my mother take me to the dollar movies to see Britney Spears star in Crossroads after spending the last quarter of 2001 making her listen to Britney’s self-titled on the way to wherever. The only album I played just as much was NSYNC’s Celebrity.
Before and after Celebrity, I thought it was clear that JC Chasez was the most talented vocalist in the group. I assumed being able to sing well was the most important factor in a singing group, but during this album’s rollout, it became apparent that success is about so much more than talent, and JC was not the meal ticket. JT had the celebrity required to push a product. He had ties to the biggest pop star in the world at the time, and girls liked him. I ain’t really got nothing to add to that. I mean, I guess. Women liking you is a guaranteed cash grab. See any highly successful man in the entertainment industry. The music industry knew that his type of desirability (aka a white boy singing in falsetto) came with a prepackaged fan base of millions of women and girls believing said white boy was singing high notes on love songs to them specifically. And Celebrity was clearly Phase 1 of a plan to set Mr. Justin Timberlake far apart from his bandmates.
Celebrity’s sound was vastly different than what we had come to expect from NSYNC, although the lead single, “Pop,” was the album’s most obvious Top 40 hit. The rest of the album on the other hand detoured from the clichéd, cookie-cutter, virginal boy-band gimmick—not entirely but to the point of eyebrows being collectively raised.
The album was very . . . Black.
Very . . . rhythm & blues.
Or as the music industry likes to call it, urban.
“Them white boys be jammin’,” my daddy said after I forced him to listen to the album on a long car ride. Jammin’ ain’t a word that ever been used to describe five highly rehearsed white boys wearing hair spray. Corny? Yea. Popular? Of course. But jammin’?
The second single, “Girlfriend,” kept my side-eye twitching. But it was the release of “Gone” that solidified what I already felt. Up until “Gone” JC was THE lead singer and my favorite band member. But this ain’t about JC. It’s about the profitability of Black music being paired with white celebrity. When the success of the group’s debut album was followed up with the mega success of No Strings Attached, the sophomore curse had been broken. Now the solo star could emerge. Celebrity was a showcase for JT, and “Gone” was his first solo single. The music video only reinforced that we as an audience had to either fall in line or draw one. Cause JT was finna break out of that group shit, and soon.

JT is great for making you feel like you’re floating into oblivion. And although FutureSex/LoveSounds has been called his best work (I won’t disagree, seeing as how I spent an entire summer staying up to wait on the “What Goes Around…/…Comes Around” music video to play on MTV Jams, and I spent years watching the FS/LS tour on DVD, learning every arrangement, and my mother spent almost a year listening to “Losing My Way” every morning on the way to school), I would still say Justified is my favorite. “Take It from Here” and “Still on My Brain” both got the rainy-day vibes I need to mourn a relationship I never even been in. The album—to this day—occupies one of the five discs in my car’s CD deck. It still scratches. I still endure it. It still rides. Shoutout to Pharrell—not for stealing Kelis’s money but for giving us this.
We never saw Justin Timberlake half as cool or a quarter as talented as we did when “Cry Me a River” dropped. It was a rebrand. A statement. In fact, this exact song is what made so many of us jump on the bandwagon to Aight, we see you. Once he put a lil pep in his step, allowed a lil 808 in his production, and understood the importance of Timbaland. We began using words like soulful, Southern, and sexy to describe the music the Blacker it got. But soul ain’t never been the right word. The right words are smart or even . . . studied. And being smart enough to study has helped him develop skill, not soul.
Whiteness is most profitable when it’s packaged as non-white and can keep an eight count, and oh lord!—don’t let whiteness cite Stevie Wonder as an influence cause what else is there to do besides shower it in artistic praise for being so aware of the greatest to ever do it. We are so easily impressed that we start inviting Justin Timberlake and Bruno Mars and Tori Kelly and [ENTER ANY WHITE SINGER WITH A VIBRATO HERE] to Black award shows to win SOUL TRAIN awards and perform tributes to Black ass singers and I find it all so very weird.
It’s also very weird how white artists like JT arrive on the scene dressed in what they believe to be Blackness, and then are thrown into competition and categories with Black artists who are better at their jobs than JT, who, at the start of his solo rise, was constantly compared to—and purposely thrown into competition with—Usher. Now we all know Justin Timberlake can’t sing a note, dance a two-step, get caught up dressed in jeans and a tie, or pretend to act in a movie better than Usher. In any capacity. On any day. Yet JT comes out, and automatically—they’re peers. Usher’s now being compared to an artist who is hoping to make music as good as Usher by using the same people Usher has made some of his best music with. All so very weird.
Justin Timberlake’s music is good because Justin Timberlake knows who to make music with. Behind many white artists who find success globally, once they decide the urban route is an easier one, there are Black producers and songwriters who give them their sound. But most musical artists don’t have runs like Justin Timberlake. Because he’s given us so many hits, it’s easy to blasé over the fact he’s mediocre at best. At singing. At dancing. Me saying 90% of his musical success is a testament to Black producers and songwriters, especially Timbaland and Pharrell, is too small of a percentage. I’m not speaking of superstardom—I’m speaking of song quality. Black genius has served him. Beyond measure. We think we love Justin Timberlake because he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent but this ain’t true and even if it was, the way he seems to enjoy staining the reputations of women more talented than him wouldn’t allow me to admit it. This is the beginning and end of this essay.

But—like I said—I am a huge fan. JT’s first three albums were perfect. Iconic. Classic. So once The 20/20 Experience was released, I left work and sped to Target to buy it. There was no doubt in my mind that the album—at worst—would still be great.
I ran out of Target, ripped off the plastic, and slid it into the CD deck. I pushed the knob so it wouldn’t start to play while I looked through the jacket. When I was done, I put my car in reverse and started the first song before driving off. From the first second of “Pusher Love Girl” to the last chord of “Blue Ocean Floor,” I could feel my brain surrender. By the time I got to “Blue Ocean Floor,” I laid the seat back and stared at all the stains on the roof of my car in some type of extended orgasmic bliss.

Then they—the white artists that we’ve welcomed with open arms and open ears and open pockets—reach their final form. Which is their initial form: white. We all knew that once JT had everything he could’ve ever wanted professionally, and after gaining the access to branch out into more lucrative things like film and apparel, and after spending a decade in the belly of Blackness’s benefits—just like Robin Thicke and just like Miley Cyrus and just like all of them at some point in time—Justin Timberlake would wake up one day and decide he was ready to be white again.
And so he released Man of the Woods.
I remember reading a headline that said, “Justin Timberlake comes out as white,” which is both hilarious and all too predictable to the point where me choosing to opt out of buying a physical copy for the first time and only liking two tracks on the project is just as hilarious and predictable.
Me not liking the album is the point of the album.
I’m no longer the target audience of this re-rebranded JT who used this rollout as a love letter to his Tennessee roots—which are way different from a Black Tennessee singer/songwriter’s. Being proud to be a white Southerner at this point just feels inherently racist. I’m sorry. I really tried not to write that. But with this album, the days of Justin singing his version of R&B were officially over.
Justin Timberlake knows you don’t get to cross back over, which feels like the statement he was making with Man of the Woods. And I can’t help but to mourn it. Same way I mourned the dismantling of every boy band I’ve ever loved.
Now I struggle with trying not to be excited about whatever JT song happens to play on shuffle. The shit is still amazing. Like truly amazing. And ziplocs me into very specific moments of my life. Now I find myself sneering whenever “Mirrors” happens to come on but refusing to turn it off whenever I hear “Tunnel Vision.” I debate myself—depending on the day—whether or not I need any of his music at all. I delete it all out of my library, but then I have a sudden urge to hear “Only When I Walk Away” and download it all back. I personally would like to walk away not only from the nostalgia, but also from the conversation about when to separate the art from the artist. I can’t do that shit. I don’t wanna do that shit. I want the artists I love to have some sense of integrity and critical thinking skills and at least care about the people who have given them the life they have. Now, when certain songs come on, I smack my teeth. I really don’t think it’s a big ask to be able to hear an artist I grew up with come on in the car without wondering whether I’ve assisted in the execution of the long con.
Again.
Then I sing along.

Born and raised in Dallas, TX, Kendra Allen is the author of the essay collection When You Learn the Alphabet and the poetry collection The Collection Plate. In her free time, she loves laughing and leaving. You can find her work in and on Repellar, The Paris Review, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, and more. Fruit Punch: A Memoir will be released July 5, 2022. 

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