In Which Shawty Right There She's Got Everything I Need

The Archaeology of Bieber

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Most of the cultural phenomena that surrounds pop music is self-explanatory — it all really boils down to “the men don’t know but the little girls understand” — but sometimes a phenomenon requires further explanation. Evidence: Never Say Never, Bieber’s 3D concert film-slash-documentary, now has both a theatrical-release DVD iteration and a “Director’s Fan Cut” with another forty minutes of footage tacked on. This new version is ostensibly another opportunity for fatigued moms and dads across the country to drive to the nearest Best Buy and buy more Bieber swag for their children.

The name “Director’s Fan Cut” is problematic — is it material chosen by the fans or by the director? Is it implying that Jon Chu, Never Say Never’s director, is himself a fan and that the new cut displays his fandom more prominently than the original? Or did fans film it the way they did in Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That! That would be funny.

Regardless of the imprecise Director’s Fan Cut designation, it is important to note that NSN is receiving the same DVD release treatment as an epic cinematic juggernaut like The Lord of the Rings. Such a packaging assumes that the original viewers will want to spend more money to own the extended footage — those in charge of peddling the DVD must hope that the original viewers are superfans and thus superconsumers. This assumption is, of course, correct.

Never Say Never has a lot more in common with The Lord of the Rings trilogy than one would initially think. Both films depict a tiny, appealing protagonist in possession of something powerful; both films involve rabid fan bases and powerful allegiances; both films use shots of deafening, multi-thousand-person crowds. The Battle of Helm’s Deep : Orcs :: Bieber’s climactic Madison Square Garden show : little girls.

Never Say Never's purpose is slyly twofold: on one hand, the film provides enough audiovisual stimuli ( slo-mo three-dimensional hair flips, soulful camera eye contact) to stoke the flames of Bieber fandom; on the other hand, it gives non-fans an explanation as to why our silky-haired Canadian teen hero has so many fans in the first place.

Watching the movie and seeing its subject through so many lenses can give the viewer a weird sensation of parallax. Half of the movie is documentary-style insight, some of it intimate and familial (Justin’s baby pictures, teary testimonial from grandparents with thick Ontario accents), some of it meant to forecast Bieber’s fame (shots of him drumming on tables with precise rhythm or hitting all the soprano runs in an Alicia Keys song). These parts are raw footage, grainy and unglossed, probably included to help silence the naysayers who insist Justin’s vocals are digitally enhanced.

The other half of the movie is concert footage, and it is glossy as hell. The viewer is assaulted with confetti, glitter, frightening pyrotechnics, and thousands of hysterical, purple-shirt wearing devotees screaming in unison. Bieber’s concert is like a cooler version of those evangelical Christian masses that try to be rock shows: it is communal, powerful, and emotionally manipulative in a way that you don’t even mind. With this many shots of sobbing girls, there is always the potential for weeping-osmosis. Meaning, it is easy to shed tears at this movie just by watching the little Beliebers cry.

More importantly, Bieber’s show is slick and charming. He wears costumes that enhance his youthful cuteness – monochromatic spaceman jumpsuits and purple baseball caps, giant sneakers in which he can complete nimble little hip-hop dance sequences — and those outfits must be made of some magical sweat-absorbing material, because the Bieb doesn’t seem to perspire until the last ten minutes of the film. The backstage bits reveal a typical 16-year-old boy who eats donuts out of the trash can and says his prayers before digging into a slice of Hawaiian pizza (“Thank you God, for the Hawaiians”).

In one scene, Justin grabs an electric razor and threatens to shave his head if his tour manager doesn’t say “I love you Justin.” She acquiesces, looking genuinely terrified he’ll follow through. The Britney moment haunts pop stars still.

Portrait of the artist as a young Bieber

Over the course of two hours we see Bieber’s sudden and jarring transformation from unknown YouTuber (tuber, hehe) to international celebrity. It is the typical A Star Is Born narrative, and it isn’t. The digital twist — namely that Bieber, unaugmented by Disney or Nickelodeon, was plucked from obscurity by a talent manager named Scooter Braun and launched on an Apollo 11-like course to stardom — only makes sense to those who prefer not to consider how large and anonymous and inexplicable the Internet is. Thinking about the integers of Justin Bieber’s success is like thinking about Möbius strips for too long, or trying to put the scenes of Memento in chronological order.

Watching Never Say Never as a neutral non-fan, you can chose to ignore the commercial insanity of how gratis YouTube views translate to millions of dollars in record and merchandise sales and instead focus on what may be the source of Bieber’s success. To put it simply, Bieber is a contemporary knight. Actually, to make the medieval metaphor more accurate, he’s really more like a troubadour who has a title and vassals and a lot of gold doubloons, or whatever they called their money back then.

“I was a playa when I was little/But now I’m bigger”

Bieber’s lyrics are mostly concerned with promises of eternal devotion (I’ll never let you go”), indentured servitude (“I wait on you forever/Any day, hand and foot”), unspecified gifts (“Whatever you want, shawty, I'll give it to you”), and generally the best treatment a 16-to-18-year-old girl could ever ask for. The last time pop musicians were this concerned with unrequited chivalry, Olde English was the vernacular and not yet a popular 40-ounce malt beverage. In an interview with Bieber, Chelsea Handler admonished him for making such promises: “Sooner or later you’re gonna be Justin Timberlake…you’re gonna have to follow up on your flirting, and then you’re really going to have to close some deals.” Though it’s a typically bawdy Handler joke, it can also be seen as an apt analysis of the Bieb’s target audience: this is music for girls who haven’t had their first boyfriends yet.

“Be careful what you wish for, little nugget.”

Listen to Justin Bieber music for too long and you’ll start to notice the prevalence of the word “world.” During his performance of “One Time” at MSG, every time he croons “wooooorld” he draws little circles in the air. He implores a girl to “let me inside of your world” on “One Less Lonely Girl,” bemoans the “cold, cold world” on “Stuck in the Moment,” and on math-themed ballad “Common Denominator” tells the same unnamed paramour, “You're the light that faced the sun in my world.” Bieber’s music — he writes or co-writes most of his songs — draws lines between his world and our world, separating his ideas of place in a way reminiscent of Foucault’s heterotopias. Heterotopias are places that exist between reality and fantasmic utopia, and Foucault’s best example of a heterotopia is the mirror. A mirror is the “placeless place” where you see yourself where you are not, “in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.”

Bieber’s world, so seamlessly constructed through pop song lyrics and 3D concert footage, is the placeless place; the lyrics replicate intimacy and the 3D film replaces the real, physical Bieber, but no matter how much a pop star can be made to seem accessible, neutral viewers of Never Say Never see the illusion of access and understand it to be a part of the idol/fan relationship. In other words, to be a squealing Bieber fan is to not yet understand that one can never access Bieber the way he makes you believe he can be accessed.

Foucault concludes his mirror theory with this: “I am over there…a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself.” It’s another way of understanding pop music fandom: getting caught up in Bieber’s world (and his world 2.0) is self-revelatory. Losing oneself in extreme adoration for a pop star is a way of eventually forming identity — just ask anyone who has ever fantasized about George Michael or Justin Timberlake. The pop star isn’t singing to anyone, so he’s really singing to you. That is, until you emerge from the bubblegum k-hole and discover that a pop star and a human being are not the same thing.

A pop star is the person-less person in the placeless place, even if they are reaching their 3D hand out to you and making meaningful eye contact, even if they retweet your tweet that says “I LOVE U SOOO MUCH <3 <3” in a gesture of star-fan goodwill. There is still a vast, insurmountable distance between you and the pop star. This is what the girls learned in 1965 at the Beatles’ Shea Stadium show, and what they learned at Michael Jackson’s Wembley shows in 1988, and what they learned at Madison Square Garden concert in 2010 when Justin Bieber flexed his troubadourian muscles by pulling a young lady onstage for a serenade. Maybe in order for the little girls to understand, they first have to willfully avoid understanding — and in order to do that, they might have to buy both the original cut and the Director’s Fan Cut.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. She last wrote in these pages about exercise videos. She tumbls here.

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