When it comes down to the big three producer-MCs who have defined club-friendly rap over the past decade-- Diddy, Pharrell and Timbaland-- Tim's the one who's been best able to rein in his self-indulgent tendencies. He hasn't spent more time being a pop icon than a musician, hasn't suffered from any major dry spells of creative entropy and, most importantly, has known enough to let his beats do most of the heavy lifting. This might be one of the reasons he's considered by most trainspotter pop fiends to be more of a genius than those other two; even when Tim runs his mouth, it's typically been innocuously catchy-- even complementary-- enough to keep the production's strengths at the forefront. The other main factor in his genius, as anyone who's had a radio on at any point in the last decade knows, is his ability to integrate unexpected niche-genre sonics most hip hop and R&B producers wouldn't steer towards-- bhangra, jungle, trance-- and use them for a kind of universal club futurism that, since it fits well in damn near every place people dance, makes for an easy route to chart and cultural dominance.
When Tim's shit goes wrong, though, it's harder to get to the root of the problem. His recent bodybuilding obsession, his divisive, grandstanding mini-sets during the Justin Timberlake tour, and his forehead-smack of a beef with Scott Storch (?)(!) have made for great blog-snark gossip fodder, but they don't necessarily signal any kind of creative decline, especially after the juggernaut year he had in '06. But while solo Timbaland's always been a mixed bag, Timbaland Presents Shock Value is more mediocre than it has any right to be, filled with overreaching pretense and phoned-in vacancy-- either trying too hard, or not hard enough.
Almost everything potentially great and really wrong about Shock Value is exhibited in leadoff track "Oh Timbaland". The beat's built on the same piano hook (from Nina Simone's "Sinnerman") that Kanye West pillaged for Talib Kweli's "Get By"-- he's just made it more manic, releasing some Dirty South tension with Shaq-hand-sized claps and Catfish Collins chicken-scratch guitar. It's a hell of a way to start things off, even assuming you don't care that a song about a man futilely trying to escape his transgressions is being appropriated so Tim can issue death threats and brag about his private planes. Simone's reconstructed voice is a sinister hook ("Oh Timbaland, where you gonna run to?"), and Tim's answer to this haunting, retribution-of-God threat (a quickly tossed-off "nowhere"), is a sign of the hubris to follow.
Not that Tim half-asses anything on the production end. The first two-thirds of the album are front-loaded with the kind of futuristic club beats his rep rests on, and some of them-- the berserk Bootsy-meets-Thomas Dolby-by-way-of-Basement Jaxx house-funk of "Release" and the "The Way I Are", which sounds like "Push It" gone trance-- are straight-up jaw-droppers. But the record's also plagued with some of the most empty, dead-eyed, joyless lyrics to hit the clubs in a while. Tim's on-record persona has soured drastically in the last few years, trading in the relaxed party-rocker's swagger of Tim's Bio and Indecent Proposal for a tensed-up, violent defensiveness. Where he used to be all about shaking off haters and basking contentedly in his wealth, he seems a lot more obsessed now with maintaining a shaky thug cred and using his status as a bludgeon.
"I know shit ain't sweet, so the shit get deep/ I'm rich, I can pay to have you six feet deep," he mutters lifelessly on "Come and Get Me", while the petulant hostility of "Kill Yourself" culminates in a chorus ("Go on, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself/ If I was you I wouldn't feel myself") that feels like the Dew-fueled frothing of a 14-year-old caught up in an anime message board flamewar. Even his turn on the hilarious failure of a strip-club jam "Bounce" (as in "...like your ass has the hiccups") is riddled with death threats and gun talk; at least guest rapper Dr. Dre-- who, admittedly, resorts to terrible Chinese-name double-entendres ("Sum Yung Ho") and rhyming "ain't this money handsome" with "ain't this a panty anthem"-- remembers it's a track about fucking.
In this context, rife with fuck-you-haters self-consciousness and obnoxious posturing, even the guest roster on this album feels like it's caught up in a lazy arrogance. Justin Timberlake shows up on three tracks, first offering more of the usual Prince-baiting on lead single "Give It to Me", and then some ecstatic harmonies on "Release", which are great when you can hear them under Tim's atonal half-sung bellowing. (This same atonal half-sung bellowing overextends its welcome on almost every non-rap track, by the way.) Unfortunately, his dopey "you on me and me on you and you on her" traffic control on "Bounce" marks one of the album's most slack-jaw stupid moments. Aside from a freaky-as-hell Missy, pretty much every guest rapper-- from 50 and Tony Yayo to Attitude and D.O.E.-- rhyme like they didn't have to pay half a mil to get their spot on the track. (Jay-Z and Kanye were supposed to be on the album, but missed the deadline-- aw, don't be sad, there's a Magoo appearance!)
Then there's the much-touted rock collaborations, which either fail to play to the bands' strengths (the Hives' Howlin' Pelle Almqvist-- backup singer?) or prove why Timbaland is still a hell of a lot more interesting than most modern rock in the first place. The only thing more cringeworthy than the first time Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump screams a simpering "wipe that smi-hul off your fucking fayyyyce" in "One & Only" is the eighth time-- though the line "Be my unholy, my one and my lonely" is a pretty strong contender. And the last track, "2 Man Show", features Tim admonishing Elton John for coming in too early with the piano, then spends the rest of the track talking about how great the song actually is rather than just proving it. Like almost every other lyric on the album, it's all a conceited bluff.
So Timbaland spends an hour on the wrong side of the "ft.", fans wind up cringing for a while, and then we suddenly remember he's doing the Björk album and we get geeked again. As bad as this album is, it's not offensive enough to worry about for too long; if its contents were split up into 17 singles and B-sides and one-shots and scattered across the charts for 15 months, it'd hardly be worth worrying about. It's just that it's disconcerting sometimes to be confronted with an entire album's worth of evidence that geniuses can fuck up, just like everyone else.
