In hindsight, Lance Bass still doesn't care for Miley Cyrus' performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last month. But he has mellowed on the topic since first referring to her as "naked and humping a finger."
"I think Miley did exactly what she needed to do," Lance told E! News last night at The Abbey's Christmas in September party in West Hollywood.
"Everyone's still talking about it, she has the No. 1 album right now and that's what you get at the VMAs. So, I mean, kudos to her for figuring it out!" (For the record, it's Miley's single "Wrecking Ball" that is No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.)
Not that he liked it or anything, of course.
"I'm a huge fan of her music," Lance insisted to us.
"The performance," he added, shaking his head and shrugging, "it didn't do anything for me or..." He threw up his hands.
"It was so shocking, but that's exactly what you wanted," concluded the former 'N Sync star, who knows something about having to deal with a teenage audience. "That's exactly what the world wanted to see.
"But I personally just love her voice," he added, "and I think she's so talented and you didn't get to really see that in that performance. But it's the VMAs, it's not the Grammys—you're not there to show off your voice, you're there to shock people and to have a good time, and that's exactly what she did."
Lance isn't the only one who figures that Miley knew what she was doing. Elton John just said on Ellen: "The whole purpose of the VMAs, when you got all these big artists competing against each other for attention, is to flatten the opposition. She flattened the opposition."
Meanwhile, the only thing shocking about Lance's appearance at the VMAs may have been how short it was—but he maintains that the reunited members of 'N Sync had a ball showing up to support Millennium Award honoree Justin Timberlake.
"It was amazing, it was like our 10-year high school reunion," Lance told us. "It was like not a day had passed, we got to go rehearse for a full week down in Miami and really just try to get back into it.
"And I want to say that we're better dancers now," he added with swagger. "We picked it up way quicker than we did 10 years ago, so somehow, we learned a little more over the years."
And 'N Sync fans everywhere loved every second of it—no twerking required.