Justin Bieber: Blue-Eyed Bummer

A few days ago I watched Saturday Night Live for the first time in ages. The guest star of the show was Justin Bieber, the teenage star whose fame has seemingly skyrocketed after being discovered on YouTube in videos of him singing, posted by his mother. Before I was forced (by pop-star-induced nausea) to turn off the television, I witnessed Bieber act in a skit with Tina Fey in which he was a sexy middle schooler the teacher had a crush on before he went on stage to perform one of his brainless songs.

Listening to Justin Bieber speak (let alone sing) is physically painful. His word choice is even worse. In the skit, when he receives his graded homework and sees that he got a C+ he says, "It's aight."

That "aight," that one tiny little word, spoken by tiny 14-year old (or whatever) lips, made me want to boil my brain in scalding hot liquid, then scoop out the remains and feed it to rabid seagulls, who would then fly to Bieber's manager's home and defecate my mangled medula all over his sportscar.

There is so much in the word "aight," and even more in the way it was spoken by this Canadian adolescent. It was so trained, so affected, so....appropriated.

I think what bothers me most about this kid is his adopted authenticity. This boy is white, Canadian, and suburban. The only contact he has had with the word "aight" is through his appropriative contact with BET and trashy movies like "Step Up," in which other white characters appropriate black language and culture to make said language and culture 1) more profitable (easier to sell a white face than a black one), and 2) more easily digested by white audiences, whose tastes are the ones that matter in this market.

In step with this logic is the production of Justin Bieber. As hip-hop becomes more and more mainstream--"pop"ular one might say, "one" being me--the money-hungry music industry sees more and more ways to not only exploit black culture, but to get even richer off that exploitation. Suiting Bieber up with a slew of "hip-hoppy" ballads and a whole new vocabulary--"'Mama,' Justin, not 'mom!'" I can hear his managers correcting--robs actual hip-hop of its authenticity while simultaneously passing little Justin off as a member of that club.

Issuing Justin Bieber with Nikes and forced-sounding slang does not, however, give the kid an automatic "culture-card." Instead, it reveals the racism of the music industry, which believes that a certain brand of shoes and the use of improper grammar encapsulate black culture and the culture of hip-hop.

Bieber and his handlers, though, are not the only ones I charge with these crimes. Kanye West is also on my Most Wanted list, along with Justin Timberlake and others.

That being said, I don't blame Bieber, really, but his handlers. He's a child, after all, and a product. (A product first and a child second, actually.) They, however, are adults and are aware of the implications when they dress Bieber in high top Nikes and instruct him to say "aight" and "mama" instead of "okay" and "mom." The fact that they are aware of the implications, though, feeds right into their abuse of Bieber: they don't care if the kid ends up with an identity crisis and a drinking problem. They'll all be rich.