Whatever the opposite of the sublime is

Some thoughts on Justin Bieber and his new album

This is my first time listening to a Justin Bieber album. I’ve never been interested in his music or any blue-eyed soul-pop hybrid, my own personal almost genetically predisposed aversion and it extends beyond the pale. When Amy Winehouse arrived on the scene, a ready-made diva, I found her aggressively derivative. The instantaneous fanaticism confused me, had anyone heard Ann Peebles? “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down,” was my thought as the taunting melody of “Back to Black” flung itself across the globe with the thrust of a villain’s cackle. Her noir was a metaphor, a night skinned by private torment, the hollow of unchecked brooding, not that of her borrowed sound. Now that she’s gone and a martyr to her music, it’s taboo to admit, but I criticized my early-adopting friends who had claimed to know the history of soul as a genre, were devout bedroom DJs, and whose taste I had trusted. I thought Winehouse a female descendant of Elvis and I was born into a world of James Browns and those who tried to swaggerjack them without consequence. I warned the converted that she was possessed by a force that might overtake her, energy she could harness but couldn’t handle. I felt no satisfaction when she did succumb, and her hits remain totems of an unresolved tension between image and influence.

Bieber exists in a dilute region of that same lineage, one that finds him unabashedly adorning his new album SWAG—his 7th studio album, announced and released within twenty-four hours as if just in time for the summer’s buck moon swooning—in skits about his willful immersion in black culture. This is in keeping with his unforgettable, though often forgotten hymn, one less lonely nigger, where a teenaged Bieber sings facetiously about the probability of another black death. A little filmed experiment he tries with a smile on his face. His black is literal and necromantic, deemed parody though what’s funny.

His cronies on SWAG, paid enablers, promise him he’s a white boy with a black soul. The minstrels and their attaché, who they train to replace them and must return to reprogram and update every few years when the slang evolves. Bieber is forgiven for his trespasses because he too has been extracted from all his life. He does not have a black soul but he does have a dark and troubled aura, the kind that echoes Michael Jackson’s: have you seen my childhood? Bieber joins the ranks of the live sacrifices we call stars, and he cannot seem to recover, he’s part of the archetype and the archetype is a lace of stone covering him forever. He gets to be problematic because the habitual pawing at a personality both hip and wholesome is all he has, a forever fracture. Even the money that comes with his labor seems scarce, or controlled and precarious at times. Hype him up, tell him he’s black deep down, on the record, a compliment and ridicule in the same breath.

—

Aggressively “discovered” or plucked from his life in Canada at the age of twelve, and politely trafficked into his superstardom by Scooter Braun (from whom he’s now estranged) and with help from Usher, Bieber is a human crossroads wounded child star soldier of industry, groomed by monsters into mimicry of their customs which include periods of silo devoted to churchgoing and recreational drugs. During these sabbaticals, he might simultaneously ruin and revamp his reputation, and escape or renegotiate both marriage and recording contracts. I’m struck by the way Justin walks around cities like New York and Los Angeles as if he’s very literally ducking debris, as if some cosmic fall-out is gonna crash into him any moment and he’d better crouch and bend his wane, agile frame like a stray canine trained in the low syntax of ever-present surveillance.

What is he bracing for all the time? Lately, he’s seems haggard in a youthful, rich boy way, in that typical prince of popular song way that allows a dissolving personality to appear destroyed yet invincible. He reminds me of Whitney Houston before she was taken, or maybe of some hybrid of her and Mac Miller and Kurt Cobain. We forget, because these are people who simply have more charisma than most at their disposal no matter how bad they might feel, that they have gone from eloquent and always ready to be seen, to erratic and dodgy, capable of showing up but performing a mild-mannered crisis each public occasion. Nevertheless, there’s always a here, damn album in the spirit, a comeback-finale we hope is surpassed with a triumphant world tour; the life force of pop stars and the tyranny of their handlers wouldn’t have it any other way.

SWAG is that, the stunting is palpable, it is its own shadow, or a self-inflicted wellness check complete with the postcard family photos featuring his often derided for staying wife, and their son performing how the west was won style bliss and reconciliation. The music itself… it isn’t terrible, but as a thirty-one year old man he sounds stunted in the era of his debuting years and afraid of realizing any potential for substance and growth. He demonstrates just enough to say, I’m still here, I can appear on a billboard, I can behave as an icon, a father, a husband, dominant, disciplined, hush now. To make up for seeming well-adjusted, he posts footage of him and Sexyy Red in the club the day of the release, not even waiting a full weekend to resume his exhibition of chaos. He is very clearly in the middle of a long-standing rebellion against his own identity and those who constructed it for him. His most creative acts are his breakdowns and refusals, his shirtless, eyes-closed stints at festivals and his flustered confrontations with paparazzi.

He could use a new sound, an overhaul, one that would disturb his most loyal fans and no longer be merely popular and radio ready ballads about loving his girl or relationship drama soothed by sentimentality but never meaningfully resolved. He comes closest to this on the song “Dadz Love” which features Bay Area legend Lil B spouting his signature messianic positivity while Bieber offers the hook dad’s love with varying degrees of whimsy until he seems to be praying for what he’s naming, healing of it, and spontaneously reparenting himself. This is the only true love song on the album and I think it deserves to annoy everyone in public spaces for months, as it surely will. “Standing on Business,” an interlude, is that track that most aligns with the zeitgeist he’s creating outside of the studio. He samples himself yelling at paparazzi in a parking lot, a clip that went viral because he used every word of new black slang available to him, all in one sentence, in effort to banish the relentless cameramen. They kept filming, it escalated into the now-viral it’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, comeback. Some find it endearing, many find it nauseating. I find it honest. Justin Bieber is not black but he has been made into a minstrel and his only defense is more hyperbole, more self-sabotage, more entitlement and white flight, in hopes that if he goes far enough the public will finally realize he is losing his grip on the fantasy he’s supposed to be selling, and he’ll be free.

Speaking of freedom, it’s hard not to assume the outcome of the United States vs. Sean Combs just a week before this sudden release, hasn’t informed some of Justin Bieber’s behavior over the past year. This stupor between ruin and repentance, where he seems most comfortable for the time being, might have been triggered by Diddy’s arrest. Shortly after Usher took Bieber under his tutelage, he gave Diddy guardianship over him for a weekend. It didn’t seem arbitrary, it seemed like a ritual or test drive. The footage reads like a kidnapping being framed as a great time, hazing in an unauthorized fraternity. SWAG feels like the extended soundtrack to that boys-will-be-boys style nightmare; like the work a hostage makes to pay ransom.

American popular music in its sour bubble gum style and ethic, is dead, but labels demand it be reanimated again and again until the artist tasked with this either goes insane or dies. There are signs on this release that Bieber might be strategizing an escape, that he might be playing both sides, and that they’re playing him right back to black. Everybody wanna be a nigga but nobody wanna be a nigga, is how Paul Mooney heartbreakingly described it. If you really seek to know the souls of black folk, become exactly the kind of entertainer Justin Bieber is, one who won’t be allowed to retire or evolve, trapped in the version of himself that sells the most records and then discarded when he can no longer pretend that version exists. Right about now is when. Only in America do blatant cries for help mistranslate to decadence and frivolity so well. And only here do we get to be teenagers forever if we so desire, as long as we’re making sure our daddy issues turn a profit.