Monday, February 21, 2011
7:31 AM
To be perfectly honest, I never thought I'd spend this much time waxing poetic about Justin Bieber.
However, upon posting my previous blog entry via Twitter, a couple of friendly followers pointed out Bieber's recent comments about rape and abortion. I haven't been following Bieber -- I only decided to listen to a couple of his singles after seeing his appearance on Conan, during which the audience half-cheered, half-booed -- so until the comments were brought to my attention, I wasn't even aware he'd made them.
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here.
First of all, the original Rolling Stone article published a misqoute. I'm not sure the amended quote (available in the link above) really changes the landscape all that much, but the fact that Rolling Stone felt the need to clarify the interview on Bieber's behalf says, to me anyway, that they were well aware that the comment-as-published would be controversial. We like controversy in this country. It sells magazines.
You can draw your own conclusions about Bieber's answer.
Bieber's answer aside, why in the world did the issue of rape and abortion even come up in this interview? Justin Bieber is a 16-years-old kid. He's barely old enough to shave! Rape is the sort of subject matter that world-weary adults tiptoe nervously around, so it couldn't have been a very comfortable line of questioning for Bieber. I mean we're talking about a kid who came across painfully awkward just trying to keep up with Conan O'Brien's patented brand of deprecating humor.
Why would anyone dump this sort of heavy-handed, politically-charged material on a kid? It might seem cynical, but it's hard to believe the interviewer wasn't aware that there was a good chance to snag a juicy, possibly controversial sound byte for his/her interview.
I wonder if Bieber's parents/publicist were even aware that the question was going to be asked? If they were, you'd think Bieber's publicist would have taken him aside and discussed the answer with him ahead of time. It's hard to be sure without seeing video or hearing audio, but my gut tells me that the interviewer blindsided Bieber.
Sometimes, I'm just that cynical.
I wonder if Bieber's parents/publicist were even aware that the question was going to be asked? If they were, you'd think Bieber's publicist would have taken him aside and discussed the answer with him ahead of time. It's hard to be sure without seeing video or hearing audio, but my gut tells me that the interviewer blindsided Bieber.
Sometimes, I'm just that cynical.
So yeah. Watching clips from his bio pic on Conan, there's no doubt that Justin Bieber carries a lot of clout with his fan base. In that regard, he has a responsibility to be a positive role model. There are a lot of young girls and boys out there (mostly girls, I suspect) who hang on his every word. They live and die by his example -- just look how heartbroken this little boy was when Bieber got snubbed at the Grammy Awards last week -- but Bieber himself is only a child. His family, his mangers, his publicists: they all play a major role in shaping the sort of man Bieber will become.
And so do the media. Bieber's answer was presumably his own -- there isn't a publicist in the world who would have given that answer two thumbs up -- but that doesn't absolve the people who dropped a bizarrely inappropriate question in a child's lap; the people who deliberately misquoted him in their article and then rushed out to perform half-hearted damage control when the malarkey hit the fan. The people at Rolling Stone are well aware of how influential Justin Bieber is within his target demographic, yet they chose not to excise the question.
Having said all that, I still think Bieber get's dumped on unfairly by a number of inappropriately passionate people. Criticism of the Rolling Stone interview is well-founded, but wishing death on a young boy for releasing popular music is bang out of order. I'm not a learned man, but even I can see that there's a serious loss of perspective in that sort of vitriol.
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