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The influence of black culture was there from the start of Timberlake's solo career: His debut album, 2002's Justified, was produced by The Neptunes and heavily influenced by R&B, funk, and soul music, genres that were created and then popularized by the black community. Timberlake's subsequent albums, Futuresex/Lovesounds and The 20/20 Experience (I and II), followed in the same vein, developing a pattern in which he mined black creative inspiration and talent to achieve his biggest hit singles. But as his Super Bowl performance quickly approaches—his first since 2004's Nipple-gate, which nearly destroyed Janet Jackson's career, but we'll get to that later—it's clear that he's not the only one. White pop stars have a history of wearing blackness as a profitable costume, then discarding it the moment it stops being beneficial for them.
White women's culpability when it comes to perpetrating this kind of behavior is especially harmful, as they tend to exploit and commodify both black style and sound. Katy Perry, for example, effortlessly mocked black culture in her 2014 music video "This Is How We Do." In it, Perry wore cornrows and ate watermelon; at one point, a black man slam-dunks a basketball over her head. When she wanted to drastically shift her image with last year's Witness, she enlisted the help of Nicki Minaj and Migos to add edge to the album's lead singles, "Swish Swish" and "Bon Appetit"—and was immediately called out for it.
And then there's Miley Cyrus, who notoriously used black culture to sexualize her image with the 2013 release of Bangerz. In an attempt to pivot from the cookie-cutter remnants of her Hannah Montana days, Cyrus teamed up with producers Mike Will Made It and Pharrell Williams for the album. She also featured cameos from Future, Big Sean, and French Montana, which further symbolized Cyrus' musical departure from the genres of pop and country on which she built her career. But then, in an interview last year with Billboard, she swore she was finished with hip-hop due to its materialistic and misogynistic nature, while simultaneously promoting the "rootsy" feel of her latest album, Younger Now. Like Timberlake and Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Kesha have also turned to pop country (with Joanne and Rainbow, respectively) in an effort to make more "deeply personal" or "introspective records."
