‘I’m so proud to be from this city’

Stanley Kubrick. Sam and Dave. “SexyBack.”

Those were just a few of the many elements that came together Saturday night when pop star Justin Timberlake returned to FedExForum in Memphis for a two-hour homecoming concert that was a state-of-the-art spectacle of stagecraft and a tour de force of progress. dance-funk showmanship and expressive balladry.

“My name is Justin Timberlake and I represent Memphis, Tennessee,” the Bluff City-born, Millington-raised singer said early in the show. The line received such an enthusiastic response from the energetic sell-out crowd that he repeated it again, about 15 songs later, before the acoustic interlude that was the highlight of the concert. In perhaps the most powerful moment of that interval, a solo Timberlake strummed a guitar and crooned one of the more sophisticated and heartbreaking songs in his repertoire, “What Goes Around… Comes Around.”

Although Timberlake’s ambitious “Forget Tomorrow World Tour” has 11 more dates planned for the end of the year, FedExForum shows — Timberlake’s third in that arena since 2018 — placed Memphis bookends, more or less, on what has been quite a busy year for the 43-year-old singer. In June, Timberlake was arrested in the Hamptons, an exclusive New York vacation area, and eventually pleaded guilty to “driving while impaired.” The incident was a speed bump in a year that had begun on a high note in Memphis, when Timberlake performed a rare small concert on January 19 at the Orpheum to promote the release of his sixth album, “Everything I Thought It Was .”

“I dreamed about this when I was a little boy,” Timberlake testified Saturday night, apparently as pleased with the concert as the fans in the audience were. “It was in this city where I had the big dreams.”

He appeared to choke up with emotion as he added, “I want each and every one of you to know that you put me on my back, Memphis. You lifted me up. I’m so proud to be from this city.”

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Even JT fans in the crowd who had traveled from out of town cheered Timberlake’s displays of Memphis affection. Jason Hirtz, 42, was part of a seven-member family-and-friends group that had traveled here from St. Louis in matching homemade “I (heart) JT” T-shirts. “The last time I saw him, he was with NSYNC,” Hirtz said, referring to the so-called “boy band” that bridged Timberlake’s childhood appearances on “The New Mickey Mouse Club” and his adult pop solo stardom.

“The opening act was Christina Aguilera,” said Hirtz’s girlfriend, Tabi Maroney, 46. “That shows how old he is,” she joked about Jason, then added, “You’re never too old for Justin Timberlake.”

Or too young, apparently. Asked her age, a little girl who skipped past a reporter to her seat replied, “Six!”

Nevertheless, even the warm-up seemed to accept that most of the fans in attendance were in Timberlake’s age group. “Memphis, if you left your kids at home tonight to come party with JT, screeeeeam!” urged Virginia-born deejay Andrew Hypes, whose hour-long mix that started at 8 p.m., consisted of crowd-pleasers that may be more familiar to people today than the nursery rhymes of their childhood, if not their ABCs: “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Hot in Herre,” “We Will Rock You, ” even “Macarena.”

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Looking elegantly casual, Timberlake was backed by as many as 15 dancers, singers and musicians throughout most of the show. His band, the Tennessee Kids, featured fellow Memphian and Rhodes College graduate Elliot Ives on electric guitar, and also included four horn players to add traditional funk-soul punch. Keyboards (occasionally played by Timberlake himself) and synthesizers contributed electric blips and beeps that matched the impressive high-tech stage design, which included a panoramic video screen and a huge monolith that emerged from the back wall of the stage to occasionally tilt or hover over . the musicians, like the mysterious monoliths that spur a leap in cosmic evolution in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Sometimes the monolith was still standing on stage, acting as a kind of video screen, as during Timberlake’s performance of “Drown”. For that song, video screens appeared to transform the monolith into a giant water tank, with a huge figure of Timberlake inside, struggling like a hapless Houdini to escape the box as the water level slowly rose. “You let me down,” Timberlake sang. “You didn’t even try to save me.”

At times the monolith’s surfaces swirled with psychedelic, cosmic or meteorological images. Meanwhile, the background screen presented close-ups of the singer and musicians alternating with depictions of strange environments (an almost apocalyptic desert landscape) and flashing words: “LOVE,” “SEX.” As overwhelming as his surroundings were, Timberlake remained in syncopated movements, striking poses, embracing partners and performing stuttering Michael Jackson-influenced dance moves.

After performing the hit “Cry Me a River” and more than a dozen other songs, Timberlake and nine of the Tennessee Kids left the big main stage and made their way across the packed FedExForum floor to the smaller one, to the delight of the crowd. , more intimate deejay scene where they performed gentler tracks (“Flame”, “Selfish”). “Hold on, I’m comin’,” Timberlake said during the short journey, paying homage to the 1966 hit by Stax legends Sam & Dave.

The entourage returned to the main stage for what was essentially the concert’s grand finale, the one-two-three punch of Timberlake’s most familiar, danceable and arguably irresistible songs, “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”, “Rock Your Body” and “SexyBack.”

As fans filed out of FedExForum after the show, many grabbed a souvenir that had established the evening’s positive vibe even before Timberlake took the stage: an 8 x 12 sheet of paper which was printed with retro-futuristic lettering that suggested. of old computers, “YOU LOVED UNTIL THE END OF TIME.” A sheet of paper with that message had been placed on every seat in the FedExForum.

This article originally appeared on the Memphis Commercial Appeal: Justin Timberlake concert in Memphis full of hometown love: Review