I’m fascinated by Justin Bieber.
Or the idea of Justin Bieber. The cultural import of a Justin Bieber. Because I don’t actually like his music, though “Baby” has its moments—none of which are owed to Ludacris.
If you’re interested in my full thoughts on Bieber’s album, actually, you can look up the review I did last year. It’s not one of my best reviews, admittedly:a friend pointed out that I wasn’t really being fair to Bieber, indicting him for pretending to be in love when he’s really just a little kid. Probably true, but his hyperbolic declarations of his many “one true love”s still pissed me off.
I’m more interested in why Justin Bieber exists like he does—this weird-looking Canadian pop jackrabbit who gets spoofed by Aziz Ansari and ends up on a remix with Kanye West and Raekwon.
Did I mention there’s a remix of a Bieber track featuring Kanye West and Raekwon? Because there is, and it’s fantastic. It’s a reworking of his “Runaway Love,” skewed Wu-Tang, buoyed by an up-and-down hum that weaves through the instrumental. Raekwon and Kanye both attack with some ferocity, which makes it all the better when Bieber floats in to deliver his “I’m just trying to be cool, cool, cool.” Getting on a track with Raekwon and Kanye is a good start there, Justin.
Bieber occupies this strange cross-section of the pop-music universe; he’s the rare child music icon who provides some degree of interest for his older, more self-serious peers. Most of these juvenile types exist in a vacuum, operating in an entirely different cultural language, but Bieber’s stardom happens to coincide with a general merging of hip-hop with the broader musical landscape.
What you’ve got is Justin Vernon—mastermind of Bon Iver and a soon-to-be aspect of Duke Performances programming, part of the Megafaun-Fight the Big Bull Sounds of the South project—showing up on the track “Monster” with Kanye, Rick Ross, Jay-Z and Nick Minaj. You’ve got Dan Auerbach of fried-blues garage-rockers the Black Keys singing the hook on “Oil Money,” shored by verses from Freddie Gibbs, Bun B, Chip tha Ripper and Chuck Inglish.
All of a sudden, there are three just-released singles featuring white singers—albeit very different from each other: Auerbach’s a rocker, Vernon’s a folkie, Bieber a popster—making noise at the same time. Is it a coincidence that two of these involve Kanye? No. But it’s still interesting.
What this means is that, even if Bieber isn’t necessarily being taken seriously by his peers, he’s at least having his existence acknowledged, taken advantage of—and everyone knows it’s always good to be noticed. Where he’ll go from here is the most intriguing part of the whole story. He is, after all, Usher’s protege, and there’s one very particular archetype for a route that Bieber could take: Justin Timberlake. That’s probably the ceiling for Bieber’s career.
It’ll be interesting to see whether his stardom can be sustained, and for how long, and whether it’ll stay anywhere near the level that’s preserved in the great recent New York Magazine feature that chronicles his latest performance on the Today show. NY Mag mentions a bubble, and his fans closing in: it’ll be all the Bieber machine can do to keep that bubble from imploding.
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