Get out Your Flannel, Justin Timberlake Is Coming to Portland

Fresh off his perfectly cromulent Super Bowl halftime performance, Justin Timberlake has announced a string of tour dates that will bring him to the Moda Center on Nov. 16.

IMAGE: Ryan McGinley.

The Man of the Woods is coming to our neck of the woods.

Fresh off his perfectly cromulent Super Bowl halftime performance, Justin Timberlake has announced a string of tour dates that will bring him to the Moda Center on Nov. 16. It'll be his first time in Portland since 2014, when he swung through on the very tail end of the promotional cycle for his two-part The 20/20 Experience double album. He was perfectly cromulent back then, too.

In case you haven't been paying attention, it's kind of a weird time for JT right now. After a decade-plus of everyone mostly agreeing that he is, at worst, fine, he's suddenly become pop's top pariah of the moment. He promoted his new album, Man of the Woods, with a trailer that looked like an ad for Stetson Cologne, suggesting he'd abandoned his R&B influences and gone all Bon Iver, prompting essays suggesting he was "rebranding as a white man." When the album dropped last week and revealed itself as an attempt to bring "SexyBack" back, critics shat on it anyway. Then Twitter lost its mind when word got out that he was planning to employ a Prince hologram during his Super Bowl performance. When it turned out he was simply projecting images of him on a sheet, while briefly covering "I Would Die 4 U," people shat on it anyway.

Will the (not-totally-undeserved) furor subside by the time he gets to Portland in the fall? Hard to say, but for his sake, let's hope Kanye surprise-drops a new album so we can all get mad about that instead.

Tickets for his Moda Center show go on sale next Monday, Feb. 12, at 10 am.

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