Children grow up quickly these days but none more so than little Justin Bieber, who has announced plans to publish his memoirs at the tender age of 16. If you’ve noticed a preponderance of helmet-haired youths in your neighbourhood recently, Bieber may well be the reason. The Canadian teen is a global superstar, popular largely with children, many of whom ape his peculiar hairstyle, in which the hair is brushed forward over the forehead and ears, giving the impression of a man three times his age trying to hide a receding hairline.
It is a grievous journalistic cliché to write about an artist’s look for lack of anything to say about his or her music, but Bieber’s sheer fame, quantifiable by all manner of digital means, threatens to make normal critical faculties redundant: seven hit singles from his debut album; 314,613,808 YouTube views of his song “Baby”; 5,053,803 followers on Twitter; 10,818,838 Facebook users who “like” Bieber. In the face of this data onslaught, the aggregator website Metacritic is able to muster only the feeble statement that his most recent release, the My World 2.0 album, has had “generally favourable reviews”.
Bieber is our latest Art of Listening subject, not for his own music, but for what others have done with it. Fittingly for a global superstar whose fame rests largely in the digital ether, his recent country-tinged ballad “U Smile” has been put through the digital mangle (this is a technical term) by a musician named Nick Pittsinger and stretched so that it plays 800 per cent more slowly than the original.
Using a piece of software called PaulStretch, Pittsinger maintained the song’s pitch so that what results, rather than a turgid lower-end growl, is a surprisingly pleasant collection of ambient noises. Some listeners have compared the new track favourably to the music of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós – but that only goes to show how music that is marketed as ambient or “experimental” can often be based on conventional chord progressions and song structures. One reason for Sigur Rós’s popularity is that their songs still have simple hooks and recognisable choruses, despite their slowness.
The salient feature of “U Smile 800 Per Cent Slower” is Bieber’s castrato-like wail, extended into a seemingly endless, crystal-clear peal
that arches over the entire 35-minute track and morphs too slowly to form recognisable syllables. It’s as if he had been suspended in time – his teenage charm turned into inchoate moans, languishing amid a series of ill-defined whooshes of sound.
But perhaps this is how Bieber, who seems to be moving through life 800 per cent faster than the rest of us, experiences the world around him. Our hurrying to and from work, our moments of panic about how we will pay the next month’s rent, or whether our jobs will still be here a year from now, merge into an indistinct, smeary backdrop to the life of this boy who has already amassed more capital than most people on the planet will see in their entire snail’s-pace existence.
None of this should be confused with the practice of “i-dosing”, which was fearlessly exposed by a recent investigative feature in the Daily Mail. According to the Mail‘s reporter, i-dosing is a craze whereby American teenagers “change their brains in the same way as [taking] real-life narcotics” by listening to clips of ambient music that feature binaural beats – two tones played at slightly different frequencies in either ear. “The craze has so far been popular among teenagers in the US,” the Mail says, “but given how easily available the videos are, it is just a matter of time before it catches on in Britain.” Let’s hope that young Bieber fans aren’t tempted by such nefarious pursuits.
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