Justin Bieber and the Image of My Terrifyingly Inevitable Death

It may be hard to imagine now—what with the thousands of books dedicated to him, the volumes of academic articles, the American Idol theme nights and the dancing circles at fiftieth birthday parties—but there was a time when Elvis Presley was something of an unknown. There was a time when Presley had not yet been absorbed into the safety of the popular music canon. In June 1956, towards the beginning of his career, Presley appeared on NBC’s Milton Berle Show in an infamous hip-swinging performance of ‘Hound Dog’, an event inscribed in popular music history for two reasons. First, the performance was electric, eliciting shrieks of delight from the young audience. Second, and most importantly, it got terrible reviews. Following the airing of the performance, the New York Times would write that Presley had ‘no discernible singing ability’, while the New York Daily News would decry how popular music had ‘reached its lowest depths in the “grunt and groin” antics of one Elvis Presley’. The New York Daily News of 1956 could not possibly have anticipated Iggy Pop.

Not much has changed since then. When the teenage Canadian pop star Justin Bieber recently visited Melbourne to perform to hordes of screaming fans at Rod Laver Arena, the Age review mentioned not the qualities that made Bieber so appealing to his fan base, merely that his voice was squeaky ‘when not autotuned’. Justin Bieber is, in effect, in the same position as Elvis Presley in 1956: enjoying extraordinary success but suffering a disproportionate amount of hatred from those who don’t count themselves among his fans. Forget that his album is certified platinum and that his concert movie Never Say Never has topped box offices. What counts is that, at least as far as adults are concerned, every mention of Justin Bieber finds itself accompanied by an almost universal compulsion to talk about the teenager in a tone of mocking condescension. Take for example the acidic tenor of this report from TheVine on the release of an internet browser application called Shaved Bieber:

This plug-in, released by US developer Greg Leuch, takes the sledgehammer/ant approach of ad-blockers and refines it to focus its power on one particularly irritating target. Specifically: Justin Bieber … Any mention of the chipmunk-faced one is replaced with government censorship-style black bars.¹

It is apparent that there is a hegemonic position of hatred towards Justin Bieber, a broad cultural response much bigger than the mere sum of people’s opinions, as illustrated by this curious post in a Mess+Noise message board: ‘never seen nor heard this dude / it’s good to be me’. How to account for this phenomenon of Bieber-hatred? How to explain something so apparently universal that even someone with no knowledge of Justin Bieber nevertheless knows that they should hate him? The first thing to note here is that the situation is certainly different in some respects from the Elvis case. Elvis Presley’s bad press can be explained in part by him provoking an audience of a time unprepared for the overt sexual displays of modern pop music. While Bieber too is certainly capable of eliciting sexual excitement (his song ‘First Dance’ may be the most badly disguised metaphor for losing one’s virginity in the history of popular music), he exists in an era where we are capable of addressing the question of sex with relative frankness.² You know our ability to be shocked by sex is low when Lady Gaga can perform at a music awards show in her underwear with fireworks exploding out of her brassiere and not kick up much of a fuss.

Could the explanation for Bieber-hatred lie in the fact that most of Bieber’s fans are young girls? In a 2002 essay, Gayle Wald observed the familiar way the media expressed disdain for ‘feminine’ pop music while elevating the so-called authenticity of ‘masculine’ rock music:

this high/low hierarchy is based around notions of fickleness, superficiality, and aesthetic bankruptcy of the material forms that girls’ desires take in popular culture … The power of this hierarchy, however, is not limited to the organization of notions of good and bad art. Rather … it makes it possible to render an ‘aesthetic’ critique in the form of a patronizing depiction of the teenybopper herself.³

One can certainly see this logic at work in the media coverage of Bieber’s live performances. There is always the implication that Bieber’s fans are flighty and superficial, that they don’t engage with his music in a serious or critical way, as expressed in the Guardian review of a Justin Bieber concert in Birmingham: ‘What does matter tonight [for Bieber’s fans] is that he’s cute, very fluffy and rocks a silver hoodie with cuddly swagger.’

There is a complicating factor to be added to all this: Bieber’s detractors seem to divide equally along gender lines. Indeed, the reviews from the Guardian and the Age were written by women. It used to be that feminist writers would work hard to legitimise feminine modes of consumption by analysing the specific economies of desire enacted by young girls in their consumption of popular music and the agency they exerted within it.⁴ Now, feminist writers join in the attack on the alleged degeneracy of young female consumers. This change is emblematic of what Slavoj Žižek describes as the function of the superego in today’s culture:

The superego inverts the Kantian ‘You can, because you must’ in a different way, turning it into ‘You must, because you can.’ This is the meaning of Viagra … Now that Viagra can take care of the erection, there is no excuse: you should have sex whenever you can; and if you don’t you should feel guilty. New Ageism, on the other hand, offers a way out of the superego predicament by claiming to recover the spontaneity of our ‘true’ selves. But New Age wisdom, too, relies on the superego imperative: ‘It is your duty to achieve full self-realisation and self-fulfilment, because you can.’ Isn’t this why we often feel terrorised by the New Age language of liberation?⁵

Take the large-scale feminist attack on the Twilight series. Was this not nothing at all to do with women’s ‘liberation’ and everything to do with assigning guilt to Stephenie Meyer, her protagonist Bella and the hordes of Twilight fans for not following the superegoic injunction to transgress traditional gender roles? This injunction fails somewhat, however, to account for the social phenomenon of Bieber-hatred. While Twilight raised the ire of feminists for presenting male objects of desire who fulfilled the patriarchal role of the physically overpowering father figure, Bieber is presented (at least in his lyrics) as a much more vulnerable figure. A large portion of the lyrical content of Bieber’s two-part debut album My World is devoted to describing the singer’s inability to fulfil his sexual role. In just one hit single about heartache—2010’s ‘Baby’—Bieber charts the whole pathological spectrum of male inadequacy: denial (‘You know you love me / I know you care’), neurosis (‘Are we an item? / Girl quit playin’’), despair (‘My first love broke my heart for the first time’) and desperation (‘I’ll buy you anything / I’ll buy you any ring’).⁶

Could the answer to Bieber-hatred be simply that his music is not any good? My first instinct here is to argue for the merits of the music. I could make the claim that any sensitive account of Bieber’s music would have to admit the sophisticated production values of My World (for example, in ‘Baby’ with its combination of thunderous, sentimental piano chords and insistent hip-hop beats offset by that jagged synth riff courtesy of Terius Nash aka The-Dream). I could discuss Bieber’s preternatural vocal gift for modern R&B stylings—how he displays the robust fluidity of a young Michael Jackson on tracks such as ‘Favorite Girl’, the breathy delivery of a Pharrell Williams on ‘Runaway Love’, the skittish rhythms of an Usher Raymond IV on ‘Common Denominator’. But these arguments would be beside the point, for whether or not you think Justin Bieber is musical genius or musical trash, the quality of his music is about on par with scores of other pop artists none of whom have inspired the animosity that Bieber has. So a mere case of value judgement of musical qualities does not answer our question. What then is the answer?

And then, while watching his video clip for ‘One Time’ on YouTube, I think I begin to see the repellent element of Justin Bieber. There he is on my computer screen, jumping up and down in his grey hoodie and oversized baseball cap, grinning maniacally at the camera, repulsively confident, supposedly fifteen years of age but looking closer to a prepubescent twelve. Could it be his youth that we despise? Of course, we have loved many young musical performers in the past such as Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, but I feel I’m getting closer to the answer: it’s not youth we despise but youth’s radical potential—that which constitutes the new. And Justin Bieber does represent something new. There is his musical style, not groundbreaking but certainly at the cutting edge of R&B: the melodically minimalist way of singing a whole line of syllables with only one or two notes (‘One Time’) or the use of alienating vocal effects such as Auto-Tune (‘One Less Lonely Girl’). Yes, these tools have been used before, but they are new enough for critics not yet to have found the language to discuss them in a productive way. The eternal challenge of the art critic is to create a new language to describe the new. The jazz critic Bob Rusch would recall hearing Miles Davis’s innovative 1970 album Bitches Brew for the first time and thinking: This to me was not great Black music, but I cynically saw it as part and parcel of the commercial crap that was beginning to choke and bastardise the catalogues of such dependable companies as Blue Note and Prestige. Presley (who, like Bieber, drew from a tradition of African-American music) also suffered the indignity of the New York Times questioning whether his phrasing could even be called phrasing at all.

Another aspect of how Justin Bieber introduces the new is the way he has been formed by the new media environment of the internet age. The director of Never Say Never, Jon M. Chu, describes Bieber as ‘the kid that learnt how to do Rubik’s cube from YouTube. He’s the kid that learnt how to yo-yo and beatbox and learnt to dance from YouTube videos. That’s of this generation to the fullest.’ Justin Bieber didn’t just grow up through the internet. The internet enabled him to amass a fan base, introduced him to his current manager and, after making him a superstar, allows him to maintain close contact with his fans through social networking sites. If the child personas of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder represent youth in its most benign form—as an adult projection of purity—Justin Bieber, in his precocious synthesis of modern performance styles and in the way he thrives in a media environment that quite frankly scares a lot of adults, represents youth in its radical form, the way they introduce the new by going about things in their own way.

It is not a secret that adults hate children. One only needs to consider the common motif of scary children in horror films to recognise the truth of this. The Omen (1976), Village of the Damned (1960), Orphan (2009) or even this year’s Insidious—they all prove the universality of our desire to imagine the inhuman dimension of children. It is a cliché to remark that we were all once children, that one need only remember one’s own childhood to relate to children. When we look at a young person, we are scared because we correctly recognise that though we may have been through childhood before, we haven’t been through this childhood before. What scares us in children is that element that is beyond our experience, a revolutionary moment capable of exploding the order of things.

We encounter reminders of our approaching death all the time. After a certain point, each birthday becomes a marker on the road to annihilation, but there are of course many other kinds of markers. I’m terrified that they’ll start playing Radiohead on Gold 104.3 because after that, all that is left is to wallow in an infantile nostalgia until I bite the dust. It will mark the moment when what was revolutionary in my youth has fallen victim to an inevitable institutionalisation. It will mark the moment when I have become one of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s much scorned ‘adults’. The onset of revolutions throughout the Arab world at the start of 2011 acted as one such reminder for the Western world. Didn’t the vibrant force of the Egyptian revolution confront us in the West with the hypocrisies of our so-called democratic ideals? Didn’t the youthful spirit of the Egyptian protesters in a way remind us that our own democracy lies decrepit, having long ago given up its will to the whims of capital? Didn’t the Egyptians’ authentic assertion of free will highlight just how lacking we in the West are in genuine political choices? The trauma of such knowledge is what drives us to Bieber-hatred. In a similar way to how we feel threatened by child prodigies, people in our workplace who are younger and more successful than us or sexual rivals with the advantage of youth, we hate Justin Bieber because he represents a revolution-of-now from which we are alienated—the flipside of one’s own revolutionary moment being rendered passé and the signal of one’s encroaching death.

In the language of psychoanalysis, Justin Bieber has become the focal point of a fetishistic disavowal. How does this kind of disavowal function? The dominant way seems to be through hostility: we deal with our alienation from the revolution-of-now by perceiving that revolution as the threat rather than death itself. For example, many people perceived the democracy movement of the Egyptian revolution as alien to Western democracy.⁷ The result? We were unable to face the truth of how we were complicit in—and were ourselves victims of—the forces against which the Egyptians fought. (I’m not talking here simply about the West supporting Hosni Mubarak but rather the capitalist ideology that enabled him to retain power for so long and that dispossessed the working class.) Instead we expressed suspicion of the revolution itself with an army of politicians and concerned media personalities expressing fears that Islamic fascists would take over Egypt after Mubarak was removed. The second way we disavow this external revolution-of-now is by denying its radical Otherness. This means we acknowledge the revolution, but we deny that there is anything new about the event by absorbing it in a comfortably established discourse. You may have noticed another trend in the media coverage of Egypt: an ideologically motivated attempt to frame the revolution as the product of Western entrepreneurialism. This meant talking about the revolution not as if it were caused by social antagonisms brought about by free market reforms and an elitist regime colluding with the United States and the International Monetary Fund but simply as a social movement against a brutal dictator brought about by Facebook.

In this version of events, capitalism isn’t acknowledged for its role in producing fascism but rather as the cause of resistance to it. In the most cynical fashion, when Time magazine chose someone emblematic of the Egyptian revolution as their most influential person of 2011, they chose not the factory workers or the unemployed students who constituted the majority of the resistance. Instead they chose Wael Ghonim, a successful executive at Google. In this way, the decadent West soothes its fragile liberal sensibilities: don’t worry, the world still runs on our time. In the case of Justin Bieber, this form of disavowal means talking about him as if he were merely the latest phenomenon in a familiar pop music tradition. This accounts for articles such as one published in the Chicago Sun-Times titled ‘Teen Idol crush: Like mother, like daughter’ in which the author misidentifies the Bieber phenomenon as a repetition of her own childhood love for David Cassidy. (The David Cassidy reference becomes quite a motif if you trawl the internet at any length for commentary on Justin Bieber.)

The problem with Bieber-hatred, as I see it, is that by indulging in it we allow our vanity to dictate our judgement and in doing so we act as slaves to our fear of death. But how is one to act freely? When one has passed from the thrilling, unstable, radical mess of adolescence into the bloated mud of adulthood, how can one act freely when confronted with the trauma brought about by the new? The French philosopher Félix Guattari once described adolescence:

a lived experience can’t be defined in terms of age groups. I prefer looking at it as made up of different sorts of ‘becoming’: becoming-child, becoming-woman, becoming-sexual … These becomings can occur at any time, not necessarily at a fixed age … I think that adolescence, as far as I can recognize it, constitutes a real microrevolution, involving multiple components, some of which threaten the world of adults. It is the entrance into a sort of extremely troubled interzone where all kinds of possibilities, conflicts and sometimes extremely difficult and even dramatic clashes suddenly appear.⁸

Perhaps one of the most radical things we can do as adults is to return to our adolescence. Not in the sense of recovering our old obsessions with video games and skateboards and so forth, or buying large red sports cars (the terrain of the old mid-life crisis). I mean in the sense of opening ourselves to the dramatic mutations and ruptures that define the adolescent experience. Isn’t it true that in art, the most exciting people are those who maintain an openness to the new, while the most disappointing artists are those who seek a stultifying ‘maturity’ in their art.⁹ This is not to suggest that I advocate a blind, uncritical acceptance of Justin Bieber just because that’s what the young kids are doing. Yet I do suggest that when confronted with the new, there is some value in jumping into the dark, burrowing in and charting the strange pleasures of an unknown terrain without preconceptions of it or of oneself. When one encounters Justin Bieber—his high-pitched song, his fresh-faced good looks—and one is confronted with the image of one’s terrifyingly inevitable death, one should not fear but rather dance before the devil.

Copyright Brad Nguyen 2011