JT's music was influenced by a cultural progression started in large part by Arnold Schoenberg
Two years ago when Justin Timberlake released his latest album FutureSex/LoveSounds, I absolutely hated it, mostly because of how much I don’t like teen pop albums but also because the big single off of it, SexyBack, sounded like the sound track to the apocalypse. The dirty synth, heavy pulse and distortion on Timberlake’s song sound more scary than something erotic. It reminded me of the first track of Busta Rhymes’ Intro to E.L.E.. That being said, if you listen to how distorted the synth is (even if there is a clear fundamental pitch which goes up and down a minor second) you’ll find that each attack is essentially clusters of notes and that the melody sung by Mr. Timberlake is modal rather than in a functional key. The use of modal keys and what are essentially pitch clusters all has to do with the dissolution of functional tonal harmony over 100 years ago.
Listen closely to pop music, jazz, contemporary classical music and you’ll hear what baroque and renaissance counterpoint label as dissonance being used in an entirely consonant fashion. This is in no small part due to the forcible progression of our musical ears by the Second Viennese School. Their founder, Arnold Schoenberg, wrote extensively about the emancipation of dissonance and how, society could come to accept the sounds of any cluster of pitches as they are and judge a work on its thematic content, rather than in the context of what a “dissonance’s” resolution could be.
This process began quite a bit earlier than when Schoenberg and his disciples Berg and Webern arrived on the scene. Franz Liszt wrote atonal works and Richard Wagner’s extended tonality could be considered atonal for certain stretches as any sense of functional key is indiscernible. The hitch to calling these works atonal is that they still created harmonic direction which resolved into another dissonant chord, essentially series of drawn out “pre-dominants” (like the Liszt Bagatelle sans Tonality). The theoretical establishment considers this “direction creation” to still be tonal music by definition, even if it isn’t functional tonality.
Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until Webern or the composers he influenced in the post-war period that tonality was truly escaped. Schoenberg’s and Berg’s melodies and musical gestures were largely tonal ones and in analysis of their works, dominant and tonic key areas can be discerned. This is not necessarily due to their failure as composers, but rather the difficulty in escaping the cultural influence tonality has on us all (there is research showing a possible element of psycho-acoustic preference for pitch centers, but it is hardly conclusive). Our ear’s desire (whether it is a cultural artifact or genetically programmed) to create a hierarchical tonality where there is a supreme pitch center cannot be understated and extreme lengths must be undertaken to disassemble this tendency.
Thankfully Schoenberg got us on this path over a hundred years ago, one that we are certainly still traveling on.
(Thanks to Noam Faingold for some very nuanced observations).