A Deeper Look at Justin Beiber

Before you stare at shock at this title and whisper things such as 'Good grief, how fickle. Bring back JAFHR's excellent views on philosophy, iTech's fascinating rants about aeroplanes and JHWW's... what does he write about? But anyway, we don't want to listen to this uncultured idiot's views about people who I'm sorry I ever heard of.'

And this would be a perfectly valid view to have, but I implore you to continue reading because there's something deeper behind the superficial nature of this 'artist'. I would also like to point out that 'a deeper look' does not involve... okay, never mind.

Bieber in New York in 2009

Basically, Justin Bieber is an internationally Canadian successful pop singer. Don't blame Canada, though, he's really as American as South Korea. Most people concentrate on the two things that I think are the least relevant to this post about Bieber: his singing ability and public image. These things though, are relevant to his fame and, to a lesser extent, popularity, so I see it as necessary to cover them briefly, Firstly, Bieber can sing. No matter what you hear his critics say, he gets the notes right and technically the only thing wrong with his voice is that it lacks the emotional depth of a better singer, Adele for instance. This problem could, however, be put down to poor lyrics, but I'll get to that later. The latter aspect of Bieber that people often draw attention to is his public image, which I won't get into too much. To his fans, he is exactly the kind of bland, unintimidating boyfriend every bland American teenager dreams of. To his haters (a group with which I do not associate myself, I might point out), he is a despicable challenge not only to his industry but to his entire gender and thus he has been labelled as many things, starting with the least vulgarity at 'gay' and ending with... well, we shan't get into that.

A shot from Bieber's hit song Boyfriend

Now, the interesting stuff. JAFHR has been going on for a while about materialism, and in Bieber I see his point. His songs, while they could be called love songs, are not about love. I know neither his fans nor haters do, but look at his lyrics. His two most popular song, Baby and Boyfriend, are as materialist as a Texan in a toy store. Baby contains the phrase 'I'll buy you anything', Boyfriend includes the line early on 'I've got some money that I'd really like to blow', while the music video shows him in a series of impossibly shiny cars on an impossibly sunny day singing to several (yes, several) impossibly attractive women. One of the cars he is driving is clearly a Ford Mustang, which is not exactly fitting considering his effeminate image and the fact that the Mustang was mocked even by Top Gear for its overt, arrogant masculinity, but makes a large amount of sense when you consider the ratio between Ford's advertising budget and Bieber's record label's artistic integrity. I'd put it at about 100,000,000 : 0.

An example of the extent of 'Bieber fever'

But what has this got to do with materialism, I hear you philosophy junkies cry. Well, if Bieber can get to the top by being incredibly bland and by pointlessly referencing Starbucks and other equally detestable companies in his songs, then surely this is reflective of our society, and it shines a harsh, damning light. Wait, I hear you cry, you would-be defender of true music, I hate Justin Bieber and so do many people. In fact we threatened to kill him multiple times. Perhaps, but does that really make it any better? I mean, thousands of young males are getting incensed over someone who should really be ignored completely if one wanted him to go away, then doesn't that shine an even harsher light? Hatred is just as bad a response as love in this case, if not worse, partially because no one hates Justin Bieber because of his music. Admittedly, many dislike his music, but often the reason is jealousy that this uninteresting, boylike adolescent should capture the hearts of so many teenage girls.

Justin Bieber isn't Justin Bieber's fault, he's our fault.

-PWN-

While researching this post PWN listened to Justin Bieber's Baby an unhealthy number of times, resulting in a catastrophic collapse of his already poor musical taste. He is currently recovering and will hopefully be fit enough to start writing a post about Frankenstein in a few days.