This image was lost some time after publication.

Every so often comes an interview in which a celebrity manages to shake himself from his censorial bridle gear, and run wild with the "controversial" semi-thoughts ricocheting ever so slowly through his head like video Pong balls. Such was the case with Justin Timberlake's recent taunts of Soul Patrol messiah Taylor Hicks, a PR fire that Timberlake's flack, Little Ken Sunshine, would later feebly attempt to extinguish:

Ken Sunshine, Timberlake's representative, said the 25-year-old singer's comments "were taken completely out of context."

"He has tremendous affection for Taylor Hicks' success," Sunshine told The Associated Press on Thursday. "He would never say anything that personal about somebody he's never met. He only wishes him the best."

We appreciate the clarification: Now that Sunshine mentions it, it is easy to see how a tremendously affectionate observation like "he can't carry a tune in a bucket" can be twisted by a malicious journalist into coming off like some kind of value judgment. Sadly, all this talk about Hicks has had the effect of shifting the focus away from the far more important subject of Timberlake's music, such as this comment from the same Vanity Fair interview: "I wanted (the album) to look to a time when everything was really sexy. Maybe everybody was coked up, but who cares? It was hot. It was all about sex," which not only reveals Timberlake to be the first musical visionary in history to think of using sex to sell a record, but also goes a long way towards explaining why until only recently, its working title was "FlaccidDick/SnortSounds."