Family Business: Part IV

There is no one that was more present in the first 20 years of my life than my older brother by thirteen months. Not Pop, my other brother.

Unlike he and every other member of my family, I have never taken an earthly breath in a reality without each of them there for me. But, he wasn’t just there for me, I was literally there for him. Our other two siblings were at least kids when he was born and so if not for me, I imagine the last ten years would have been tough for him being, effectively, an only child.

So, I understand that my explanation of my family without using birth names can be confusing for those unfamiliar.

I have a father and a mother. They had a girl and boy in the early nineties. They waited around a decade to have two additional boys, the latter of which is the author of this blog.

Anyways, because me and my closest in age (who I’ll call ‘Bro’ to distinguish him from ‘Pop’) were born only thirteen months apart, we did everything together. But, soon after we became kids ourselves, we felt the need to individualize ourselves because we were seen as such a collective. Whether it was television shows, favorite colors, or foods, it was imperative that we differentiated what was his and what was mine. We even set up an unwritten ‘list’ of interests that were exclusive to either of us, never to be claimed as a favorite by the other.

For example, I liked Captain Underpants books and he liked Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

He liked “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and I liked “Dragon Ball Z”, “Power Rangers” and “Star Wars” depending on what was popular in my elementary school class.

But when it came to music, we were pretty uniform. We loved the same songs. Had singing contests to these songs when we were the only ones in the house. The only devices we had to play our own music was our parent’s laptop that we had to share our allotted time on and his Nintendo DS he inherited from our sister.

As we grew older, we were exposed to more and eventually formed our respective tastes. But around our preteen years, we shared an attic type room that was really two rooms with no walls in between them. Bro, because he was older, got the bigger room and inherited a radio when Pop went to college.

I had to listen to everything Bro listened to. He went to middle school a year before I did, so, naturally, explicit music became a new frontier that he unknowingly guided his younger brother into. Chief Keef, Sage The Gemini, and other early 2010’s hip hop and R&B was introduced to me by Bro during this time.

But the first full album that he introduced me to wasn’t from either of “our” artists. It was actually an artist that “belonged” to our older siblings.

In 2013, Justin Timberlake made his comeback to relevance after he hadn’t dropped a full length since the iconic FutureSex/LoveSounds with Timbaland. This was only big news to me because it was HUGE news to my sister. When the album dropped, I remember little other than Target promotional commercials for the album entitled The 20/20 Experience and him premiering some of the songs on one of those big award shows (remember those?).

Somehow, a few months after the album was secured by my household somehow and saved onto Bro’s phone, he began to play it profusely.

Actually, I think he bought it on the Amazon Kindle he had at the time.

I don’t remember. But he played it all the way through with regularity.

The thing about this album, as well as the one that preceded it, almost every song is more than meets the eye.

“Suit & Tie” was a huge hit with Jay Z so that wasn’t new to me. And “Mirrors” became one of JT’s biggest songs not too long after that. What makes this album special and what Bro showed me by laying off the pause and skip buttons, was that many of the tracks have endings after the radio edit is over that add to the essence of the record. I don’t know the musical terminology for this productional style but it's present in FutureSex and in 20/20. You won’t know it from listening to the radio cuts but “Mirrors” is eight minutes long and the last four minutes is just as good as the first.

“Strawberry Bubblegum” and “Don’t Hold the Wall” carry a similar theme. Soulful with a smoothness that I believe is exclusive to this body of work. But the second halves break down and reconstruct the feeling of the song in the best way.

The intro “Pusher Love Girl” is one of the very best songs Justin Timberlake has ever been a part of. Like top 5.

The song that Bro really got me hooked on is the enthralling and mesmerizing “Blue Ocean Floor”. Because we shared the attic floor with no walls, he would play this as we went to sleep and whenever my mind is restless, this song does the trick of making me sleep to this day.

I’m sure some of my other family members won’t be thrilled that I’m crediting a then 13 year old with showing me a Justin Timberlake album when we all really liked this album. But, the truth is, no one spent more time with me than Bro and his constantly spinning this album tattooed it in my memory in a way that they couldn’t.

Bro, thank you for being my best friend and continuing to share with me when you could’ve grown tired of it years ago.

By Billy Listyl

October 19, 2020