Wednesday, 20 November 2013

Justin Bieber grows up – and his fans don't like it one bit

Australia's Beliebers are deserting their hero after his visits to strip clubs and brothels. Time for a Tupac-style hologram of the innocent boy he used to be?

A street vendor hawks Justin Bieber merchandise outside the Mexico City hotel where the teen idol is staying. A street vendor sellss Justin Bieber merchandise outside the Mexico City hotel where the teen idol is staying. Photograph: Marco Ugarte/AP

Poor Justin Bieber: he just can't go into strip clubs and sequester sex workers these days without harming ticket sales for his Australian tour. Honestly, it's almost as if his fickle fans go to his live concerts not to appreciate the music but to witness the abstract idea of Justin Bieber: a smooth and slender model that hypnotically emits a range of electronic pips and whistles, like an iPhone that's been inseminated by the concept of Sweden.

Disappointment is what inevitably comes when you buy music due to the transient idea of boyhood innocence. I've never once bought a Motörhead album in the deluded teen-hope that Ian "Lemmy" Kilminster might give me a cuddle: in fact the very idea terrifies me (I imagine my skin would peel off and my liver would flop out of a newly formed emergency orifice). I buy their albums for the music, and therefore have never been disappointed by what they get up to in their personal lives.

If you have been attending Justin Bieber gigs just because you happen to love the idea of a ridiculously chiselled dolphin of a person entwining his virginal boy-soul with yours, then stories of him raining your hard-earned money on every single breast in Brazil are what you deserve. Honestly, judging by the reaction of some people, you'd think they'd found out BatKid paid for his cute costume by selling a record-breaking tonnage of meth.

Perhaps record labels should get around the inevitable maturation of their hairless warbling cherubs by selling tickets to concerts performed by a hologramatic concept of Bieber, one that is now as dead ideologically as Tupac is physically. A queue of 15-year-old fans could pay $70 to shuffle quietly past a glowing, sexless orb that sporadically puffs out a mist infused with the smell of hair wax and gym equipment. Occasionally it would glitch, uttering "I'm experiencing human thoughts. Please ... destroy me!" before the Biebergram's operators did a factory reset, and hologram Bieber returned to cloaking fans in wisps of scented boy-fog. Real Bieber could be off somewhere else singing songs that no one cares about.

Sadly, if you're in love with the now-perished notion of Bieber, I'm not sure his music's going to be enough to sustain your "Belieb" (it's probably a word now. Bloody idiots). His latest single, PYD or Put You Down, while sadly nothing to do with terminating a variety of pets, is still disappointing. The first verse, in order, lists a "door" "wall" "coffee table" "stove" "counter top" "dining room table", and then bizarrely, "a plane, a train, an automobile". Apparently too busy bonking strippers to write actual lyrics, Bieber has merely been hastily jotting down a rudimentary list of locations and objects in Cluedo, followed by the first Steve Martin film that came to mind. I stopped listening for fear of what the next verse would bring: "It was John Candy, in the pantry, with a tuning fork. Also I euthanised your dog. Can we pump now?"

What a load of aural tosh. If Bieber's going to sell out stadiums without the marketing crutches of a clean-cut reputation, he really needs to work on those songs, because apparently his music's not why people have been turning up. He should get advice from someone who's enjoyed the company of thousands of women and has written songs that aren't the ingredients to a board game. Lemmy perhaps?

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