Shoving. Hair-pulling. Screaming. Crying. Lots and lots of crying. And that’s only among the mothers. Stories abound of the conduct standards and crowdcontrol problems one might behold at a typical Justin Bieber concert, but judging from his performance last Wednesday, it’s not quite the hostile environment it’s made out to be. But Bieber’s fans can scream, that’s for certain, and there’s something about the floppy-haired moppet that adds a couple dozen decibels to the average teenage girl’s register.
The shrieking came in waves as the stage’s countdown clock ticked off the seconds, but as the lights dropped at 00:00:10, the hormonallyfueled clamor was deafening. The overhead LED board ran a “behind the scenes” video of Bieber playing video games with his backup dancers, but casually morphed into a commercial for tour sponsor Xbox’s Kinect. Considering the 15,000 in-house and front-row tickets with a $369 price tag, pounding a crass commercial message into the crowd’s head at its most attentive gave the show all the artistic acumen of a grocery store checkout stand before a single note was played. At its conclusion, the stage flooded with smoke, and the steelbarred globe onstage began to fill with a five-foot-nothing figure. The squeals, having coalesced into an ambient din at this point, told the rest of the story.
Teen idols certainly aren’t a new phenomenon, but the Bieber craze feels almost alien. Frank Sinatra was such a venerable figure in American music, but it’s easy to forget that as a young man, he was the object of millions of screaming bobby-soxers’ desire. He was 27 then, however. The ‘N Sync craze wasn’t that long ago, and the 2.1 million copies of No Strings Attached that they sold in the week it dropped — something that will never, ever happen again — doesn’t feel as all-consuming as Bieber Fever. Type in the word “Baby” on YouTube to see his video for the song as the first result, and you’ll realize just how popular he is — and babies are pretty popular. By himself, he’s had chart success that we’re just not accustomed to seeing teen idols have. His album My World 2.0 hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, making him the youngest male solo act atop the charts since Stevie Wonder in 1963. He went on to sell even more records the following week, making him the first artist since the Beatles to accomplish that feat.
Bieber, of course, is neither Little Stevie nor the Fab Four. His patently obvious lip-syncing to the opening three songs squashed any of those comparisons from the outset. Then again, it’s unrealistic — if not impossible — to expect a singer whose voice only changed a few months ago to have the stamina for a 113-date world tour. When it was clear he wasn’t AutoTuned, he wasn’t half bad. Bieber floated over the crowd strapped to a giant metal heart for “Never Let You Go” and “Favorite Girl,” pointing down to the audience and making a few fans’ nights in the process.
And then came the video interludes, of which there were a lot. Long stretches of YouTube videos from all eras of Bieberdom segued the young star’s costume changes from a white hoodie into… a black hoodie. Lady GaGa, he’s not. Though ultimately they were filler for an otherwise lackluster performance concept, the videos, all of which can be found on YouTube, gave interesting insight into his fan base. A video of baby Bieber singing the “ABC” song to a thumping house PA beat saw his fans singing along to the most rudimentary of ditties, and the “next time won’t you sing with me line” was eerily portentous. Though surprise guests had been a staple on his My World Tour up until the Greensboro date — rapper Wiz Khalifa appeared onstage with him in his previous show in Pittsburgh — Bieber did ensure the crowd had one less lonely girl. He brought out the writer of the Bieberized “12 Days of Christmas” for a serenade of “One Less Lonely Girl,” who shockingly wore no emotion on her face. Even the well-placed, though casual enough tussle of his hair couldn’t invoke a flinch. Over-rehearsal tends to drain the natural emotion from the inexperienced actor.
There’s little chance that anyone will be discussing Justin Bieber in the same breath as Stevie Wonder ever again, but it’s easy to see how he’s forged what musical talent he does have into such unfettered success. He’s more influenced by R&B than his peers, as his first single “One Time” and showcloser “Baby” would suggest. The former basically sounded like it could have been an Usher song, only to be handed over by his superstar mentor and made his own. Though he reaches the same audience as the Taylors and Mileys of the genre, he’s been shrewdly shaped as a young white singer acting out the black R&B idiom, in a way playing the role of a young Pat Boone and giving a white face to black music. And with Boone, being friends with Little Richard made all the difference.
