Back February of 2011, when my world was a little dark and I didn't have a lot of friends in my life, a punk-ass, sixteen-year-old, Selena-Gomez-perving, helmet-headed twerp used
the magic of 3D glasses to look me in the eye and say, "Bitch, never fucking say never."
A girl like me doesn't forget a thing like that.
***
Look, I like Justin Bieber.
And not just because he made a psychotically optimistic,
self-promotional concert film that
temporarily restored my faith in humanity.
I like him because (to be serious for a second) he
represents a very specific cultural archetype that recurs cyclically but not
regularly in the Western world. My
generation didn’t have one. There hasn’t
really been one in North America, in fact, since David Cassidy in the early
1970s: a single individual – male,
slightly effeminate, passable singing ability – who rides a wave of female enthusiasm
to unsustainable heights of hysteria.
Little boys don’t scream for their idols the way little
girls do, and little girls don’t always have an idol to scream for. The boy bands of my developmental years were
easy to market, with their flavor-for-everyone lineups...but there’s something
different about the level of adulation that emerges when everyone is screaming
for one individual guy.
Just in case it was going to be another forty years
before the next Bieber-like phenomenon, I (obviously) had to go to his concert
last night at FedEx Forum here in Memphis.
He's Justin fucking Bieber. I wanted to see him for myself. Looking like a girl...singing puppy love songs...making someone in my immediate vicinity
spontaneously burst into tears…
***
Melissa and I were in row Q of Section 219. This put us one row from the top, as far from
the stage as possible, in the worst seats I have ever had in any concert in my
life – even worse than the time Marissa and I bought scalped Justin Timberlake
tickets after the concert had already started.
To our immediate right, left, and directly behind us were
tiny, tiny humans with high-pitched voices.
In front of us was a sea of (mostly) slightly older girls. Melissa and I seemed to be the only people in
our age group who were not accompanied by small children, but no one looked at
us like we were out of place. At Aldo’s
Pizza, before the show, I waited for the bathroom with a group of middle
schoolers who were practicing synchronized dance moves in front of the sinks.
“Are you going to the Justin Bieber concert?!” one girl
asked me, talking in that super-fast way that only middle school girls can. I told her I was, and she flashed me her
braces before going back to dancing.
She
seemed like the type who might cry at the mere sight of him, and I couldn’t help but
love her completely for it.
***
The second thing I noticed when Justin Bieber descended to
the stage was his decidedly un-adolescent arm muscles. "Descended" here is the operative
word. He was attached to these weirdly
enormous wings via a harness that gently dropped him to the stage. The wings (which were several stories tall)
were the first thing I noticed. But his
arms were a close second.
That should
have been my first clue that this concert was not going to go as expected. Already he was not looking nearly enough like
a girl, and as for those puppy love songs…
“Have any of you seen me in concert before?” he asked, to
ear-splitting shrieks, three or four songs in.
He said that if we’d seen him the last go around, we’d probably heard
something like…
 |
| Boy!Justin loves the color purple. |
“What’s he singing?” I asked Melissa. She shrugged.
A few bars later, just distinguishable beneath the screams, I heard the
opening lines of “
U Smile.” And then he
moved on to the opening bars of another couple of songs from his last
album. And then he started the show
again by singing something off his new album.
Since I bought my ticket
in June, the thing that I had been
anticipating most from this concert was hearing Justin Bieber sing "U Smile." I love “U Smile.” I've belted out “U Smile” to the empty
interior of my car on enough commutes to work that I've, embarrassingly,
reached triple digits in my iTunes play count.
But twenty minutes in, there was Justin Bieber, telling me,
one of the oldest people in attendance, that he'd grown past the "U
Smile" phase of his life.
And that oh, by the way, I’d been a fool to come to this
concert without buying his new album first.
***
Or maybe he didn't sing the songs I wanted him to because, well, he couldn't. He's got a man-voice now, to go with his man-biceps.
 |
| Man!Justin collaborates with Nicki Minaj. |
There was the visible tattoo on his arm (
one of eight, apparently), and the haters-gonna-hate video in which he declared, "I just
wanna be me."
There was a dance sequence based around a paparazzi chase,
and enough gratuitous crotch-grabbing that I wanted to reach down the aisle and
cover the eyes of the kindergartener who was sitting next to Melissa (sporting a
hot pink cast and whacking Melissa periodically with her glow stick).
And then there was the moment when he shrugged his jacket
off, ever so slowly, swinging to this part of the crowd, then that, teasing
scores of fanatical girls with the suggestion that it would be them he'd be
handing it off to...
In the end, he theatrically walked back toward his band while carelessly dropping his coat to some girl he hadn't actually looked at. Something about that bit of showmanship made
me sad. Yes, I realize that concerts are
largely theater…but there was a symbolic undertone there that hit a little too
close to reality for me. Boys Justin's
age - and older – often really do treat girls like that, so add “thoughtless
clothing gifting” to the list of things I wasn’t expecting to see from the boy
who made a name for himself singing lyrics like, "When you smile/I smile.”
***
But then, about halfway through and while circling the crowd in a
crane contraption, he paused in the middle of an acoustic set to point to someone and say,
“I like your sign.”
“Awwww!” I yelled, jumping up a little in my seat. After that, he kind of seemed like Justin
Bieber to me again.
The “One Less Lonely Girl” tradition of bringing a girl on
stage to croon to remained intact, and before “Never Say Never,” he pulled a
shaking, shivering, hysterically crying girl to the stage, letting her cling to
him like he was he was her dying salvation before shuttling her backstage so he
could continue his show.
There was the video thanking his fans for their
support. There was the endless bending-over
to touch hands with the throngs around the stage. And there was the occasional throwback to
earlier albums (Can a bitch get some love for “Eenie Meenie”?) that got the
crowd going in ways the newer stuff couldn’t match.
There was something so beautifully innocuous about the audience,
seeing these girls who are only a few years away from being roughed up by “the
real world,” collectively falling into this silly but utterly harmless shared
dream. From where we sat in the rafters,
we could hear the screams of the crowd follow him as he walked back and forth
across the stage. What incredible power.
And yet what those girls were screaming for wasn’t Justin
Bieber himself. It’s something bigger
than him. Something he, himself, just
happened to stumble into. They screamed
for the fame. For the image. For the fantasy. It happened to be Justin who landed the
role this time around, just as others have before him and just as others will
after him. But he’s not what special
about “Justin Bieber.” The specialness
comes from the audience attaching meaning to him.
Theatrics and tattoos aside, he remains the only person
alive today who could make a sold-out crowd in Memphis, Tennessee, sob at the
mere sight of him.
Watching them squeal was something to see.
***
As if recapping not only the concert itself but his career
as a whole, the encore was “Boyfriend,” his most “adult” hit so far, followed
by the most hopelessly happy heartbreak song ever written, “Baby.” There were a lot of moms around us who jumped
up for “Boyfriend,” but there wasn’t a person in the place who stayed seated
for “Baby.”
It’s just fun, you know?
It’s happy and it’s carefree and it’s completely stupid and it’s
fun for
several thousand people to join in with a guy in idiotic shoes to sing the
words, “Baby, baby, baby, OH! Like, baby,
baby, baby, NO!” There should be more of
that in the world.
But teen idols are real people, and at some point, they
start to grow up. Justin finished “Baby”
by melodramatically shrugging off his vest and standing bare-chested before us,
looking every bit the eighteen-year-old that he is.
I was nagged throughout the concert by the thought that this
was somehow the end of something. There has been an irreversible erosion to the babyish-ness that made him a star in the
first place. And yet I guess the
fleeting nature of these phenomena are a large part of what makes them so
special to begin with.
I have to say that he’s done a phenomenal job with the task
that the universe bestowed upon him. He’s
done his duty in making a generation of girls believe.
One day, maybe very soon, things will change. He'll do something that makes us all remember that he's a human being and, above all else, an adult. He'll still be loved, but it'll be a more realistic love - a more terrestrial and accessible type of love. He'll become just another star (or, God forbid, has-been).
And when that happens, I’ll remember
the fun of last night and what it was like to see him at his peak…
...and I’ll always be a Belieber.
