Justin Timberlake is ready for his big return to the Super Bowl stage 13 years after he and Janet Jackson made headlines for a now-infamous wardrobe malfunction. USA TODAY
After the news broke that Justin Timberlake would headline this year's Super Bowl halftime show, this hashtag started to emerge:
That's, of course, because during Timberlake's last appearance on the biggest stage in the country, in 2004, he exposed Jackson's breast.
Timberlake has not publicly apologized to Jackson for the incident that seemingly sent her career into a free-fall (though she's recently been touring), but in a recent Beats 1 Radio interview with Zane Lowe, the bearded, beanie-and-flannel-wearing Man of the Woods implied that he had resolved things with Jackson.
The conversation, about Timberlake's upcoming performance and the one from more than a decade ago, started with Timberlake joking about how he's not going to repeat his infamous mistake, and ended with him saying that he "absolutely" resolved things with Jackson.
Here's a snippet from the interview:
Lowe: When you announced (you'd headline the halftime show), it brought up the last time for a lot of people again.
Timberlake: Naturally. I mean that's something that we talked about.
Lowe: Yeah, I bet. So what was the conversation?
Timberlake: To be honest, (it) wasn't too much of a conversation, just one of those things where we go, "We're not gonna …" What do you want me to say, like, "We're not gonna do that again?"
Lowe: That's so crazy. That is the world's biggest stage (and) to come off that stage back then and realize that everything was supposed to go to plan and now the whole thing is something completely different … the rest of the performance must've been like, one of those moments as an artist, a human being, we're you're like, "How do I roll through this?"
Timberlake: I mean, yeah, and I stumbled through it. You know, to be quite honest I had my wires crossed. And it's something that you have to look back on and go, like, "OK, well, you know, you can't change what's happened, but, you know, you can move forward and learn from it."
Lowe: And you and Janet took some time to do that after the fact, and kind of resolve the situation, like, were able to make peace of the whole thing?
Timberlake: Absolutely. Yeah. And ... I don't know that a lot of people know that. I mean, I don't think it's my job to do that, because you value the relationships that you do have with people.