Justin Timberlake’s new song “Filthy” — unveiled in a video featuring a sexy robot dancer — isn’t making a clean sweep of music fans.
But @MacLorenzo tweeted: “If you listen to it just twice, you realise Justin Timberlake’s new single #Filthy is a masterpiece.”
However, @Luke_S_notlucas wrote: “I’ve listened to Justin Timberlake’s new song Filthy three times now and it’s gotten worse each time. I tried to give it a chance. It’s awful.”
Then there’s the lukewarm take of Dan Soul, a reporter for CKLM-FM rock radio station in Lloydminster, Alberta (106.1 The Goat).
Soul tweeted: “#Filthy has some great parts and then other parts where it sounds like he’s messing around with the functions in Adobe Audition that nobody uses but for some reason come installed. Kinda like it tho.”
At The Verge, Lizzie Plaugic and Kaitlyn Tiffany did a clever explainer:
Lizzie: The video for “Filthy” is the final scene of a narrative about a rich and lonely tech CEO who invents a slim and boring robot capable of dancing to anything. Justin’s character proves this by forcing the robot to dance to “Filthy,” which mostly sounds like chewing metal while listening to an old Justin Timberlake song. In the end, we’re left with an important message: the robot is more real than all of us.
Kaitlyn: To me, this video is special because it looks like it cost more money than I will ever even be able to conceive of in my life, and what we got in exchange was several long minutes of Justin Timberlake and a robot dancing to a song that sounds like the Disney Channel TV movie version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
A sampling of other reactions: