As I write this, another Internet moral panic is breaking out about Sabrina Carpenter — specifically the sexual content in her lyrics, her live show, and her overall persona. It's something that's inevitable with an artist like Carpenter, who carries herself with a modernized Betty Boop/Marilyn Monroe/early '90s Madonna energy. And as these things come in waves, it seems that the current trend is a sort of reactionary sex-negative pearl-clutching, now masquerading as progressivism. Cover yourself, whore, but with a COEXIST bumper sticker; won't somebody think of the children, but for radfems who've just moved from Tumblr to Bluesky and are still catching up. Imagine The Seven-Year Itch coming out in 2025 and leaving them all aghast at how Marilyn is just showing off what's under her dress in a theater where kids might be watching!
Carpenter is making horny jokes? She's singing songs about boning, complete with puns about getting ejaculated upon? Doesn't she know that minors are in the audience? Children's entertainer or not, it is clearly her responsibility to shape up and be a good Christi — I mean, feminist role model! This is just a product of our overly sexualized modern world, right? The artists we listened to as kids would never make sex jokes while singing to their underaged audience!
Anyway, remember when NSYNC released a song about cyber sex?
NSYNC's third album No Strings Attached, released 25 years ago, was one of the first albums I remember listening to as a kid. I didn't get heavily into music until middle school, so by that point the only albums I listened to were The Beach Boys' 20 Good Vibrations: The Greatest Hits and Sugar Ray's 14:59, both of which I can still sing from front to back. I don't know how I progressed from '60s surf pop to Sugar Ray's unique blend of TRL pop-rock and Jimmy Buffett. And furthermore, I don't know how I progressed from there to boy band music. I remember dancing in my friend's basement to Aaron Carter's "I Want Candy," but I also remember not enjoying it — the same way I didn't really care about Pokémon but tried to get into it because my friends liked it.
If memory serves, I didn't get into No Strings Attached through peer pressure. I genuinely enjoyed the album, and listened to it enough that I would walk around singing album cuts like "Bringin' Da Noise" and the Johnny Kemp cover "Just Got Paid." I wasn't in it for the hits; I recognized NSYNC as the complex and diverse album artist they truly were.
I'm only partly kidding. Truly, I still have a lot of fondness for No Strings Attached, and though it's always hard to say with music you liked as a child, I do think I'm able to separate nostalgia from what my own ears tell me. I still recognize The Beach Boys as a great band, but with that comes an understanding from decades of absorbing their work and growing with it. Meanwhile, I have a lot of nostalgia for the Sugar Ray album, and will occasionally need to inform people that they somehow got a KRS-One feature, that they did a terrible cover of Steve Miller's "Abracadabra," and that the album opens with a death metal intro track — but I wouldn't call it a quality album. I'm able to be critical even in the face of my personal history with a record.
No Strings Attached is a good album. It's not a great one, and it's not quite a very good one. But it's good, partly because it's weird as hell. And in the boy band scene, where worthy albums were almost non-existent — where Backstreet Boys' Millennium would open with "Larger Than Life" and "I Want It That Way," two of the greatest pop singles of the late '90s, and then spin its wheels for about 40 minutes afterward — absurdity can mean a lot. If I can't have greatness, baffle me.
Like Millennium, No Strings Attached opens with its two biggest hits, "Bye Bye Bye" and "It's Gonna Be Me." "Bye Bye Bye" became a sort of easy punchline for bad music in the cultural zeitgeist, because it's maddeningly catchy, and because it's forceful. Late '90s and early aughts pop music drove rockists insane for the same reasons disco did. It's not just that it was inescapable, but also that it was confident and aggressive; you couldn't just wave it away. And when your bias against pop is primarily due to it being bland, unoriginal, and simple, mere power can leave your ideology annihilated.
I still dig "Bye Bye Bye" a lot, but "It's Gonna Be Me" is NSYNC's greatest song, and probably the third greatest boy band song after "I Want It That Way" and "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" (LFO's absurd masterpiece "Summer Girls" can be #4). The song was penned by Max Martin, whose mode of songwriting is, famously, based more around what words sound like together than what they mean. That said, "It's Gonna Be Me" is a pretty straightforward lyric, in a niche pop tradition: the "you've been hurt a lot and I know you're scared, but if you want to give me a chance, I'll wait for you" love song. The Beach Boys' "I'm Waiting for the Day" and Bill Withers' "Let Me in Your Life" come to mind. The Beatles' "You're Going to Lose That Girl" is like a prequel to this concept, a warning directed at the dude who's about to fuck up his relationship: "I'll make a point/Of taking her away from you/The way you treat her/What else can I do?" Ice fucking cold.
"It's Gonna Be Me" doesn't read as heartfelt like those songs, though. It's all force, all show. The music video portrays the band as plastic dolls for a reason. Human feeling isn't what they're selling. If The Beach Boys and Bill Withers were trying to artistically portray a universal emotion, "It's Gonna Be Me" is a recreation of those portrayals; a facsimile of an attempt to convey emotion. A copy of a copy; a game of telephone that turns Withers' soulful "I wasn't there when he hurt you/So why should I have to pay?" into "You've got no choice, baaaabe/But to move on." Of course it's artificial. Max Martin isn't selling heart and soul; he's selling bubblegum pop songs with glam metal theatrics and catchy words that probably don't mean anything. If you think you're too good for it, let me ask: did you write "Since U Been Gone" or "Teenage Dream?" No? Then shut up. Demanding authenticity is how we get schmaltz like the terrible Richard Marx and Diane Warren ballads later in the album, at which point you'll be begging for artificiality.
After the singles, we get into the weird stuff. "Space Cowboy (Yippie-Yi-Yay)" is somehow even wilder than its title. Why is Justin Timberlake a space cowboy? Because it's Y2K and he needs to blast off before the world ends! In 2018, Timberlake would release a song called "Supplies," in which he tried to make doomsday-prepping sound sexy. You heard it here first: being chickenshit during the apocalypse is a running theme in Justin Timberlake's discography.
This song also features a rap verse from Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, which means that the first two rap verses I absorbed deeply as a little girl may have been KRS-One's on a Sugar Ray song and Left Eye's on an NSYNC song. At least I started with good rappers, I guess.
The album's title and cover reference the band's legal victory over former manager Lou Pearlman, a con artist later federally imprisoned for running a Ponzi scheme that took in over a billion dollars. This victory allowed the group more artistic freedom, with JC Chasez having production credits on three songs and writing credits on four. Timberlake, meanwhile, co-wrote and co-produced "I'll Be Good for You," netting him his first producer credit. Despite this context, the title track isn't about Lou Pearlman, and is instead a conceptual retread of "It's Gonna Be Me." Shame. Imagine NSYNC writing a diss track about their manager. Wasted potential.
There are a lot of goofy textural flourishes throughout the deep cuts. "Just Got Paid" has the deepened backing vocals going "moneymoneymoneymoneymoney," an inspired addition to Kemp's original. "It Makes Me Ill" has some bubbly synths in the background that are almost proto-SOPHIE-ish, and the title track sounds a little Mario Paint-esque. But the album closer "I Thought She Knew" is completely devoid of texture by design. It's an a cappella track, and a surprisingly great one, both showcasing the group's vocal talents and giving the album a somber, low-key finale. Is this another Beach Boys connection — a tribute to "Mama Said," the a cappella closing track on the horribly underrated Wild Honey that also zeroed in on the band's brilliant harmonies? Almost certainly not, but a gal can dream.
And yes, there is "Digital Get Down," the NSYNC song about cyber sex. It actually might be the best deep cut on the album — with a heavy electro-R&B sound, complete with intense autotune applied to Timberlake's vocals that, in 2025, mostly makes me think of Emily Montes. I try not to say that everything is proto-hyperpop, but like... listen to the thing. Come on.
Sure, the song's topic is painted thinly enough to go over the heads of extremely young listeners. But from the "We're getting nasty, nasty/We're getting freaky-deaky" intro to "If we can't get together naturally/Then we can get together on the digital screen" to "I see you on the screen, I get to freaking," preteen-and-older fans surely got the message. It's not exactly subtle.
What's my point? Well, popular music is inherently sexual. It's baked into it. Sometimes, it's been subtle, but explicit sex jams go back as far as recorded music has existed. Look at Ma Rainey and Lucille Bogan, two queer dirty blues singers whose filthy 1920s and '30s recordings are now legendary for just how grotesque they get. And in the '40s and '50s, dirty rhythm & blues records used slang to subtly sneak sexual content into — haha, I'm just joshing. Songs like "Big Long Slidin' Thing," "Let Me Bang Your Box," and "Keep on Churnin' (Till the Butter Comes)" are about as subtle as a freight train. (Listen to Rhino's fantastic Risqué Rhythm comp if you wanna learn more about this wonderful era of sleaze.)
So be nice to Sabrina Carpenter. She's merely honoring a tradition that long predates her: being horny and turning it into hilarious, disgusting pop songs.
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