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Billboard debate: Best Male Pop Star of the 21st Century?
Topic Started: Feb 2 2018, 12:35 AM (179 Views)
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Is Justin Timberlake the Best Male Pop Star of the 21st Century? (Billboard Staff Debate)

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Chris Payne: When I close my eyes and think of what male pop star has defined culture since I graduated middle school, I think of Drake. Even through the nine years before "Best I Ever Had," it still feels like he was.... there. The texture and sentiment of his music, the token Drake-ness, was living and breathing in popular music for a while. He just embodied it as one person, and then took it in many different directions: the rapping, the singing, pulling off both at the same time so well that it became standard, and also re-defining the norms rappers are held to through his beefs and his vulnerability. Simply counting MCs as pop stars feels so much more natural now since he arrived. Kanye laid a lot of the groundwork for this and I personally love him a lot more, but right now this title is Drake's.

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Ross Scarano: I'm with Major Payne. One way I think about stardom is through novelty and influence. Ultimately, Justin Timberlake is a student of Michael Jackson. It wouldn't be correct to describe someone as following in the footsteps of Justin Timberlake, since he's just working from Jackson's playbook. (Allegedly, some of the Neptunes' beats for Justified were made for MJ.) Drake, on the other hand, has plenty of sons, and though Young Angel wouldn't have been able to break without the work of Kanye West and Kid Cudi, when I look at the contemporary pop landscape, it's not correct to describe the Drake clones as actually being Kanye (or Cudi) clones. What Drake and 40 created continues to impact the game on a massive level, even as Drake himself continues to absorb different sounds and styles (and accents).

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Andrew Unterberger: I'm gonna go with the guy who maybe has the least contemporary clout: Usher Raymond IV. We forget about Usher a lot when discussing the greats of this century -- but why? Aside from JT and Eminem, he's the only guy on that list that's been a star since century's beginning, and at the time, his production was absolutely un****withable. He began the century with two near-masterpieces in 8701 and Confessions (which sold a combined 14 million copies and spun off six Hot 100 number one hits) and though he's been less consistent since, he's still good for at least one absolute knockout single every couple years -- and for my money, 2012's Looking 4 Myself is still his best album, front to back.

And the thing that really gives him over the edge over Timberlake for me is that he's allowed us to see him at his absolute messiest. He's undergone just about every public drama a celebrity can -- romantic, familial, legal -- and he's put all of it into his music, too, which can be uncomfortably personal at times ("Papers," anyone)? Ross and I were talking the other day about how JT doesn't have a song as good as "Climax," but more importantly, he's never even attempted one: Justin's too cool, too composed for that, which is fine, but not necessarily what I want from my pop stars. Throw in Usher's formidable singing and dancing abilities, and his ease of evolution from the JD era in pop to the Neptunes era to Lil Jon to David Guetta to Diplo, and he's my guy for this, easy.


https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/8097708/is-justin-timberlake-the-best-male-pop-star-of-the-21st-century-staff
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Are they FOR REAL???
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i'd be between justin and bruno mars. i get the appeal for both drake and usher, but they do not make a pop star. kanye was great for about two albums in the late 00s and then he lost it completely.
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