TIPS: How Justin Bieber became the most famous teenager of the 21st century and managed to survive
Justin Bieber just turned 27, the age at which Amy Winehouse or Kurt Cobain died. A decade ago few thought, not even himself, that he could get here alive, much less become a man at peace. On March 19 he releases his new album, ‘Justice’
There were a couple of years, between 2013 and 2015, when the internet woke up every morning with a new Justin Bieber story. One day they arrested him, another day he punched a fan, another he offended a group, a country or a millenary culture. Behind that string of mischief, which made Bieber "the most hated person in the world" in his own words, there was anxiety, drugs, alcohol and promiscuity.
"Have you noticed how many child prodigies end up?" Justin Bieber asked on his Instagram two years ago. The question, of course, is rhetorical, because everyone is aware of the cycles of childhood fame. Symbols of innocence often end up as symbols of moral corruption. But Bieber's case has a peculiarity: he has traveled the opposite way. After being the official child of the planet, he has managed to reform at the age of 27 hand in hand with the Christian faith and sentimental stability.
On the 19th, his new album, Justice, goes on sale and a large part of the album's content, and the stories that will be told about him, will revolve around the theme of his rehabilitation. The first single, Hold on, is a shining hymn to hope and the support that someone close to you can give you. The recent cover of the American magazine Billboard certifies this turn towards the light. In it, Bieber poses dressed in a Celine leather jacket, biting the stem of a daisy. The headline reads: "Bieber Flourishes." And further down you can read: “Married. Centered. Sensible". Who was going to say it.
When Justin was born, her mother, Pattie, was 17 years old and had already dealt drugs, she had attempted suicide and clung to God during her stay in a mental hospital. Pattie suffered from depressive tendencies and had a violent relationship with Jeremy, Justin's father, who left them three years later. But it turned out that the kid liked music. When she was 12 years old Pattie started posting her videos on the internet and Scooter Braun, then a young aspiring music mogul, invited them to Atlanta to boost her career. At age 15 Justin Bieber became the first pop star to emerge from YouTube. "I don't believe in abortion," he claimed from the cover of Rolling Stone. When the reporter decided that it was acceptable to ask Justin, a teenager, what his opinion was on rape cases, he replied, "Well, I think that's very sad but it all happens for a reason."
Before Bieber came of age there were several websites dedicated to publishing photos of lesbians who looked like him, he accounted for 3% of all Twitter activity and at 16 years old he surpassed Lady Gaga as the most searched person on Google, which which hypertrophied his fame: there were many people who had not heard a single song of his, but knew perfectly who he was. Journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams predicted his future: “In time perhaps he will establish himself as a respectable Justin Timberlake-style star. Or maybe he ends up on a mugshot. The only thing that is clear is that we will laugh at his hairstyle ”. During the first four years of his career, Bieber had to adjust to the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. “Sometimes I read the comments. 'You're stupid', 'your song sucks', 'you're gay'. I do not get it. But there are a lot of people who like my videos and don't comment. When I like a video, I don't comment, but when someone hates you, they take their time to express it, ”he lamented.
In his autobiography, First Steps Into Eternity, Justin felt the need to affirm his heterosexuality by confessing that his favorite topic of conversation was "the girls, the girls, the girls, THE GIRLS." "You can ask me about the girls," he told an interviewer. "I love girls, they are great." The internet ridiculed his hairstyle, his smiling demeanor, and even the fact that his Vanity Fair cover was the magazine's least sold in 12 years. What they were laughing at, ultimately, was that Bieber was the most unworthy thing in music: a teenage girl idol. In the 2011 documentary about his explosive rise, Never Say Never, a slow-motion scene showed Bieber throwing a bottle of water over himself. It lasted three minutes. Then a shot of him running shirtless for ten seconds. Someone created an online countdown to mark how far until his 18th birthday. A Guardian report described how Bieber came across a life-size cutout of himself on the backstage of a concert and said, "What are you looking at, kid?" And he punched her in the face.
After he turned 18, Bieber assembled a gang of aspiring rappers, with whom he partied in strip clubs. One night in Miami, the singer showed up with $ 75,000 in dollar bills to throw on the dancers. "It was a cross between The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street," admired a record executive friend of his. That night he was accompanied by his father, who since Justin was famous, had come back to his life. Both ended up fined by the police.
"He was suffering, he was unhappy, he was angry, confused, misguided, misunderstood," Bieber recalled three months ago. At that time, while he slept, his assistants took turns entering his room to check if he was still breathing. “I went from being a small-town kid to someone everyone said was cool. Who everyone loved. And if they repeat it to you many times, you end up believing it. I didn't have to do anything, there was always someone willing to do it for me, so I never learned the fundamental concept of responsibility. I had millions in the bank, I could do whatever I wanted, and I didn't have any real skills, ”he recounted in a 2019 Instagram post.
That was the stage of ignoring her fans, of urinating in a bucket while insulting Bill Clinton, of signing in the guest book of the Anne Frank house that she would have been a fan of his, of awakening the irritation of humanity whole with his smiling mugshot, attacking his driver after being released, throwing eggs at his neighbor's house, appearing on a home video at age 14 telling racist jokes, leaving half interviews (like the one they tried to do him in Madrid for the Europa FM Yu program, don't miss anything), to leave a concert after singing a single song, to spit and threaten to kill the same neighbor he had thrown eggs at, to insult his fans ( "I don't want this shit", "you make me sick"), to walk the Great Wall of China on the shoulders of his bodyguards, or to drop his pants to take a photo in a restricted area of a pre-Columbian monument in Mexico.
Perhaps the episode that best sums up that spiral of excess and disrespect was when Bieber traveled to Munich with his monkey. Customs detained the animal because it did not have the vaccination papers in order and the singer never returned for it. Mally, the monkey, was taken in at a zoo, where he arrived scared and confused, and was never able to adapt because he had grown up among humans and did not even know the communication codes of his own species.
Following his arrest in 2014, a popular initiative sent to the White House requested that the government deport him. It reached more than 270,000 signatures. "Bieber is just an amplified version of what all teenagers are experiencing," said then the director of the documentary Generation Like, Douglas Rushkoff. "If he receives the benefits of this era - his is the first race that has occurred entirely on the internet - he too is going to suffer its dangers."
In 2015 he embarked on something of an apology tour: he brought a bouquet of flowers to Ellen DeGeneres; he invited several comedians to laugh at him on Comedy Central, and he brought something for dinner to a police car. The rehabilitation of his image culminated in a song literally titled Sorry, the biggest hit of his career. With 17 songs from the album Purpose in the North American top 100, Bieber broke the record then held by the Beatles and Drake. "Now Bieber's music is also liked by grown men," announced the Associated Press.
“You don't need to go to church to be a Christian. Going to the Taco Bell doesn't make you a taco. " With this simile, Bieber explained his renewed faith. Essentially, the singer explained that human beings had failed him. That he himself, when he was alone, was "a horrible person." So accepting that God is with him was the only thing that comforted him. Bieber did not turn to just any church, but to Hillsong, the evangelical church of celebrities. Among his devotees are Kylie Jenner, Chris Pratt or Bieber's ex-girlfriend, Selena Gomez. Hillsong's message is not far from any inspirational Instagram post: every day is an opportunity to be happy, to live your best life and to learn from your mistakes in order to be the best version of yourself. Bieber moved into the home of Hillsong leader Carl Lentz to recover and realize that his mother's chronic depression and his father's outbursts of anger had defined his character. He was in such a rush to get baptized and become what Americans call “a born again Christian,” a born-again Christian, that since all baptismal fonts were reserved, Lentz ended up baptizing him in NBA star Tyson Chandler's hot tub.
"Tell the devil NOT TODAY. The devil has no power over you if you know that God is ALIVE. His name is JESUS. Why bother when you can pray, ”he wrote after canceling his triumphant 150-stadium tour with Purpose with 14 shows to go. The official version was that the reason for the suspension was "unforeseen." But Bieber clarified on Instagram, the space where he has always known how to explain himself, that it was a depression that prevented him from even getting out of bed.
And what seemed like a celebrity extravaganza has ended up saving him. In 2016, Justin dated Hailey Baldwin, Steve Baldwin's daughter. One of them at the end of the year party aboard Leonardo DiCaprio's yacht in the Caribbean. In June 2018 they met again in a sermon by Rich Wilkerson Jr., the preacher who officiated at the wedding of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. From Justin's point of view, Hailey reappeared sent by God. That same year, Vanity Fair celebrated "the fascinating joy of Justin Bieber photos." Justin and Hailey's summer of love had been portrayed by the paparazzi in a series of images of the couple strolling, drinking iced coffee, eating raisins, or making a Rubik's cube. The carefreeness and colorful prints made Justin Bieber an unlikely fashion icon: between the urban sporty vibe, the heroin chic and the just-up aesthetic, Bieber put it all on top and carried it with an inexplicable elegance.
And on his prodigy journey in reverse, Bieber decided to proclaim himself celibate at age 24. On the one hand, in his renewed and fervent faith Bieber perceives extramarital sex as a sin. On the other, from his experience, he associates sex with a lack of self-esteem. “Before I started dating Hailey, he hadn't done it for a year and a half. It can cause a lot of pain. I was embarrassed to be super promiscuous. I think he was taking so much Xanax [an anxiolytic] because of the shame he felt. My mother always told me to treat women with respect and that's something that rang in my head while she was doing it, so I could never enjoy it, ”he confessed.
In Seasons, a YouTube documentary to promote the album Changes and the new Justin Bieber, his team called Hailey a "unicorn": her appearance in the Canadian's life seemed like a thing of magic. "She makes everything better", "is the only true thing I have." The couple married in 2019.
Last week they asked her in an interview if she was happy. He replied, "Sometimes yes, other times no." During the promotion of his new album, Justice (the T is a cross), Bieber is shown discouraged but at the same time relieved that he does not have to hide the depression that he suffers from since he can remember. At one point in Seasons, Justin and Hailey were playing at trying to dunk tennis balls into a bucket. It was an unnecessarily long, tedious and repetitive scene: Justin Bieber has never been so happy.
