On paper it was a bit of a mismatch: the global teen sensation with the obedient mop-top versus the self-appointed grumpy old git. So what did DONALD CLARKEmake of the boy wonder?
SOMEBODY has asked Justin Bieber, mop-topped gonk du jour, who his role model might be. I’ll tell you what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t ram a Lucky Strike into his mouth and begin babbling profanities about William S Burroughs or Charles Manson.
“Anybody at all? Then Job,” he says. The heathen Europeans titter. “I’m serious. No, really. You guys know who Job is? He got his family killed. His cattle. Everything. But he still remained faithful to God.”
Okay. It is a bit cheap to make fun of young Master Bieber. The pop star is still only 16. At that age most of us were still getting pencil sharpeners stuck up our noses on a daily basis. But Job? Really? The Canadian infant does come from a broken home, but, that noted, his short path through life has, to this point, made little intersection with the Vale of Tears.
It’s possible, just possible, that the name Justin Bieber doesn’t register with you. For anybody over the age of 25 – anybody without children, anyway – the current teeny-bopper idol often takes on the quality of a worrying skin blemish. You know it’s changing colour in a sinister fashion, but you try your best to pretend it’s not there. My parents, for instance, never quite got to grips with the distinction between Little Jimmy Osmond and Leif Garrett.
Bieber is more of a benign Osmondian blemish than an aggressive Garrettic neoplasm. Born in (oh, come on!) 1994, raised in Stratford, Ontario, he first registered with the outside world when certain YouTube videos – notably, a cover of a song by something called Ne-Yo – gained significant viral status.
TRIUMPH OF THE FRINGE
The makers of Never Say Never, a skilfully compiled hagiography in the style of Leni Riefenstahl, have cleverly forestalled smart-ass comparisons by actually including footage of that sneezing panda and that tumbling best man in the opening sections. He's not the first celebrity to rise through cyber-channels. Justin is, however, the first such person to threaten world domination. LOL. ROFL. KMBIKM (that last one, which I just made up, stands for "kill me before I kill myself").
Your correspondent has arrived in London's O2 Arena, a venue with appropriate flavours of Albert Speer, for the press screening of Never Say Never. Later, Bieber will address the hacks at a nearby hotel. It's 10.30am and, despite the fact that the premiere won't kick off for another nine hours, fans are already massing on the windy forecourt. As it happens, most of them have been here all night.
What first strikes one is how much they resemble teeny-boppers from any point in the last four decades. They are all girls. They clutch home-made banners featuring pretty collages. And they’re all really, really nice. When a bald man in a tweed jacket and frayed cardigan (it’s almost as if I’m wearing an “old git” Halloween costume) approaches them, they cluster round smilingly and gamely refuse to phone the police. Hours later, they will emit noises more deafening than any heard in this part of the London Docklands since the spring of 1941.
SON OF A PREACHER WOMAN
The genius who realised Bieber might inflame this demographic is a smooth-talking impresario named Scooter Braun. Having seen the YouTube clips of Bieber warbling his jolly ditties, Braun, also the controller of rapper Asher Roth, made it his business to track down the youth and bottle him for the masses.
It must, here, be acknowledged that Bieber is talented. As well as being a good drummer and a competent dancer, he has a sweet non-specific soul voice that could inject sugar rushes into the most murderous tune by Slipknot or Napalm Death (not that he’d try).
AND JUSTIN FOR ALL
Eventually, Braun got Pattie Mallette, Bieber's mother, on the telephone. Here's where the story, for anybody not living behind a picket fence in 1956, starts to take on a slightly sinister quality. In a 2009 New York Timesarticle, Mallette, a firm Christian, was quoted as saying: "God, I gave him to you. You could send me a Christian man, a Christian label! . . . You don't want this Jewish kid to be Justin's man, do you?"
But good sense overcame bigotry and Mum allowed Scooter to help Justin become the biggest pop star of the current era.
Everyone familiar with Bieber’s story has some favourite fact concerning his domination of search engines and the social media. Last July his name became the most searched-for phrase on the internet. The video for his song Baby, a teen ballad so generic it could be a South Park parody, outstripped Susan Boyle and Lady Gaga to become the most viewed YouTube video ever. (Thanks to sour teenage boys, that clip is also the most “disliked” ever.)
When, earlier this month, Bieber changed his Facebook status, the surge on the internet was so massive that entire power grids ground to a halt across the US and several airliners fell from the sky. (Only the last of these facts is made up.)
Yet Bieber's handlers in Never Say Nevercontinue to express unconvincing surprise at the number of fans who gather outside his hotel and the volume of ticket sales his concerts generate.
In one particularly disingenuous moment, Braun appears shocked at the news they were able to sell out Madison Square Garden.
Be real, Scooter. This is akin to expressing astonishment that God himself could pack that Manhattan auditorium. “And it wasn’t even his first coming,” the deity’s people might remark.
BIGGER THAN JESUS?
Come to think of it, the hush that descends as Justin enters the press conference is ever so slightly sacred. It’s weird. Nobody told us he was on the way, but somehow we just knew.
In town last night for the Brit Awards, where he got to kiss Cheryl Cole and, following an infamous snub at the Grammies, picked up the best breakthrough award, the star admits to suffering from serious jet lag. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. Still two years away from his majority, he glistens so furiously you wouldn’t be surprised to catch a smell of Mr Sheen from his crisp Canadian skin. Then there’s the hair. That helmet is the most famous cut since a certain Friends cast member helped invent the Jennifer.
Bieber seems to know it. Every few seconds, like a latter-day, less consciously ironic Beatle, the tiny man gives his head a vigorous shake. The follicles obediently return to their allotted spots.
THE GRAND BANAL
What does he have to say for himself? Well, not much. You get the sense that, used to livelier, more obedient American drones, he is perturbed by the journalists’ reluctance to click their heels and perform the Bieber salute.
Somebody asks him what’s the oddest thing he’s ever been asked to sign. It was a cereal box, apparently. Questioned on worries about how ageing will affect his voice, he drags a prepared answer from his big box of banal guff.
“What do you mean?” he murmurs in that deadened sub-Californian monotone. “Everybody’s voice changes. So it’s not like it’s abnormal. Other singers have gone through the vocal change – like Usher and Michael Jackson and Boyz II Men. That’s not an issue for me.”
Asked if he worries that the fame might all vanish, he puts on a brave face. “Music is my passion. I feel like I’ll be doing this for a long time. God forbid, if anything happens, I could make music for other people.”
The most excruciating moment comes when Bieber tries to get the throng to join in with a massed shout-out of “Hell, yeah!” The feet shuffling and guilty staring at shoes offers articulate expression of the bubbling discomfort.
’TWAS EVER THUS
None of which should be held against him. Few 16-year-olds, thrust so quickly into dizzying celebrity, would perform any better. Justin seems like a polite fellow and, if the film is any measure, he appears to genuinely care about his fans’ well-being. One cannot help wishing, however, that (tweed jacket-man speaks) Young People Today would demand a little more grit, a little more edge, a little more danger from their pop stars.
It’s a stupid thought. Led Zeppelin fans said the same thing about The Osmonds. Clash fans said the same thing about The Bay City Rollers. Arcade Fire fanatics, when sighing about the Bieber phenomenon, are singing a tune as old as recorded sound.
The girls outside the O2 couldn’t care less. If, on Wednesday night, domestic readers tilted their heads towards the Irish Sea, they might have heard a cacophonous wailing making its way across the islands. Their daughters will make the same noise in 20 years’ time. And old gits will continue to complain.
