Sexyback

Justin Timberlake is on a mission. He’s bringing the sexy back. But he’s picked an odd way to do it: he’s released a track that could have been — and probably will be — written by our robot overlords.

The song is inescapable. It’s called SexyBack, and it goes like this:

I’m bringing sexy back
The motherfuckers don’t know how to act
Girl let me something something lack
Cause you’re something that sort of rhymes with back

Yeah, I don’t know the words, which is odd because I’ve heard it about a thousand times over the last couple of weeks. Even so, I don’t get the impression that Mr Timberlake has spent a great deal of time honing his message. I’d call these lyrics dumb and execrable, but that’s missing the point. It doesn’t really matter what he’s saying. It’s the sounds he’s making when he’s saying it.

Which brings me to the point: the music, the noise of this thing. It’s electronic, but it’s not electronica. It’s beat-heavy, but it’s not hip-hop. It’s flighty and ephemeral, but it’s not pop. There’s something overwhelmingly synthetic about the whole thing. I don’t mean artificial. I mean synthetic, as in not crafted by nature. This isn’t the self-consciously artificial bleeps and bloops of the electronic wing of the music industry. This is something post-human.

There’s been a lot of talk in scifi about the “singularity” — the moment in time when the machines we’re creating start creating themselves, and then use their enhanced capacity to create even better versions of themselves, and so on, until our toasters become small metal gods perched on our kitchen counters, wielding absolute authority over the pathetic little scraps of sentience that once used them for warming bread.

Sexyback is the kind of song that our toaster monarchs would write. It’s a distillation of our recent musical history, disparate pieces fused expertly together, shot through with Timberlake’s highly morphed voice, which resonates with a kind of mechanized, nebulous yearning. It’s an artifice, constructed by a new kind of being, a thing just recently born and without any sort of cultural history of its own: and so forced to mine the culture of its progenitor/thralls, and use that material to assemble something of its own. Derivative, yes, but unmistakably new.

That’s what Sexyback is. It’s the first tentative artistic efforts of the machines, post-singularity. Which raises some troubling questions. Have we reached the singularity already, or are we just bumping along on its shoals? If neither, do we have some sort of foreknowledge built into our DNA, prepping us for the coming baton-passing? Or is this God easing us into the transition?

And most of all: why can’t I can’t stop listening to this damn thing?

Postscript: If you’ve somehow managed to avoid hearing this song, you can listen to it here. Warning: the track starts as soon as you load the page, so avoid this link if you have any Timberlake allergies.