It's hard not to have high expectations for Justin Timberlake, whose perfect storm of cuteness, talent and canny song selection — come on, "Cry Me a River" is a stone-cold classic — caused music fans all over the spectrum to fall in love with him. On his latest single, though, he seems to be doing as much as he possibly can to cloak his star quality inside cough-syrup-pitched vocals and tossed-off F-bombs (!). Maybe he's wary of putting his persona back out there in the paparazzi-plagued world of 2006. Maybe he's searching for ways to stay edgy after that whole Super Bowl debacle. Maybe he saw The Producers and wanted to try out that whole "flops can make more money than hits" theory. Whatever the reason, "SexyBack" is an absolute dud, an anonymous piece of thumping bass (courtesy of Timbaland, who seems to be on a crappy filler-single tear as of late), lazy rhymes and VIP-access name-dropping that could have come from any wannabe midlist popster.