Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2006: Justin Timberlake

Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2006: Justin Timberlake

Justin Timberlake stepped into unquestioned solo superstardom with the best clothes, moves and songs of anyone in 2006.

By Andrew Unterberger
11/26/2024

(In 2018, the Billboard staff released a list project of its choices for the Greatest Pop Star of every year, going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why Kanye West was our Greatest Pop Star of 2006 — with our ’06 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)

In 2006, the MTV Video Music Awards were essentially unredeemable. The weakest crop of winners in the show’s history to date — Avenged Sevenfold, James Blunt, “My Humps” — matched with a mostly inessential group of performances, hosted by a post-prime Jack Black. Al Gore was prominently involved. The ratings were low, the reviews were scathing, the show got reinvented the following year. But even at this nadir, one indelible moment emerged: Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, unlikely allies in mismatched suits, brushing each others’ shoulders off at center stage — the very image of mid-’00s pop cool. 

It wasn’t guaranteed that it would be this way. Justin Timberlake’s 2002 solo debut Justified was an enormous success, but one whose promo cycle ended with a Super Bowl performance of epochal disaster — after which Timberlake took a few years off to pick up acting, with mixed results. It had been similarly long outside the limelight for his new choice of creative soulmate: Timbaland, the writer/producer who’d spent the late ‘90s and early ‘00s inventing the future of hip-hop and R&B from within its mainstream, had fallen on hard times creatively and commercially. For the two to return with an album called FutureSex/LoveSounds felt perhaps ambitious beyond their current grasp. 

But from the first time you heard comeback single “SexyBack,” you knew the ego was earned. Well, maybe not the first time: The song’s abrasive electro-funk came as such a shock to the system in the era of pitched-up soul samples and MOR pop-rock that you might not have been quite sure what to do with it immediately upon its July release. But the song shortly proved itself as something powerful enough to both define top 40 and also push it forward, while severing the final ties between Timberlake and his teen-pop past — his grown-man getup and swagger a lifetime away from the MJ wannabe who showed up to the 2002 VMAs in fringe and a chain wallet. 

Of course, “SexyBack” turned out to be just the prelude for that September’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, a full-length LP of coherence and uniform song-to-song quality virtually unheard of in pop music since the ‘80s golden age of Michael, Madonna, Janet and Prince. The set clearly flashed back to MTV’s prime era not only in its high standards and quality control, but in its neon post-disco lacquer, its blending of the accessible with the challenging, its attempt to touch the past and the future simultaneously. The set drew rave reviews, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and quickly became Timberlake’s best-selling solo set to date. 

Another way FutureSex/LoveSounds emulated albums by those ‘80s superstars was in the singles it spun off. “SexyBack” bound to No. 1 on the Hot 100 in just its third week on the chart — Timberlake’s first as a solo artist. That was quickly followed to the summit by “My Love,” the slow jam second single with a hypnotic time-lapse synth hook, a half-beatboxed beat, and a guest verse by rapper-of-the-moment T.I. JT went three-for-three with that December’s “What Goes Around… Comes Around,” a two-part spiritual sequel to “Cry Me a River,” the spiteful breakup anthem that served as Timbaland and Timberlake’s first collaboration.

Like one of his suit-and-vest combos, Timberlake himself continued to wear pop stardom exceptionally well. He glided through his music videos and live performances with the confidence of a man who’d already spent a large percentage of his life in the spotlight, and who never doubted he’d be able to return to music on top. His accumulated acting experience added a new dimension to his combo-threat appeal, and his skills as an all-around entertainer were on display off when he served as both host and performer on a December Saturday Night Live — in which the uber-viral (and JT-co-starring) “Dick in a Box” short debuted, quickly making Timberlake as ubiquitous on the Internet as he was on TV. 

Timberlake ended the FutureSex/LoveSounds era with as high an overall approval rating as any other pop star of the ‘00s — and then once again disappeared from music, enjoying his life and many side pursuits as a fantastically successful celebrity who could move between worlds of his choosing at his leisure. Perhaps he realized over the course of what would become a nearly-seven-year absence between albums what the rest of his music career would ultimately bear out: Once you’ve experienced a year like 2006, there’s really nowhere to go but down. 

Honorable Mention: Beyoncé (B’Day, “Déja Vu,” “Irreplaceable”), Rihanna (A Girl Like Me, “S.O.S.,” “Unfaithful”), Fergie (The Dutchess, “London Bridge,” “Fergalicious”)

Rookie of the Year: Ne-Yo

After co-penning one of the biggest hits of 2005 for R&B singer Mario with “Let Me Love You,” Shaffer “Ne-Yo” Smith broke out as a solo star in 2006 with the release of his heartache ballad “So Sick.” The song stunned both in Ne-Yo’s nuanced vocal delivery and his obvious writer’s touch on the lyrics, and with some help from a snapping mid-tempo beat from burgeoning production duo Stargate, became his first Hot 100 No. 1 in March. Ne-Yo followed that up with top 20 hits “When You’re Mad” (No. 15) and “Sexy Love” (also a StarGate collab, No. 7), and by year’s end he had become the smoothest R&B-singing, Fedora-wearing crossover star in pop. 

Comeback of the Year: Nelly Furtado

As shocking a return as “SexyBack” was, it had nothing on the other Timbaland-engineered pop star comeback of 2006. When Nelly Furtado’s deadpanned, take-no-prisoners stomper “Maneater” — a song so incendiary the speakers literally caught fire during recording — first started making its way around the Internet in the spring, the only reaction was Really? THAT Nelly Furtado? The Canadian pop star had come a long way from her folkier singer-songwriter days of the early decade, but her clubgoing fembot makeover paid dividends — particularly once Timbaland duet “Promiscuous” became the unavoidable song of the summer, taking her to Hot 100 heights she never soared to even when she was in full “I’m Like a Bird” flight.