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Justin Bieber - Source: ONE News -
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This blog is to serve notice I intend to sue Television New Zealand for a work-related injury.
Purely for research purposes, I recently listened to the song Baby by the 16-year-old pop sensation Justin Bieber.
Bieber is a Canadian-born singer and dancer who has become an icon for tweenagers around the world. He sings in a voice that suggests he has yet to attain sexual maturity, but enjoys some benefits from this absence, including being mobbed by screaming girls wherever he goes.
He is - those who have firsthand knowledge tell me - very skinny in person, and soft to the touch.
In the song, the rapper Ludacris raps, and Bieber sings verses and a chorus, which consists of the single word Baby being repeated until it becomes a mantra of harmless longing. The word's meaning disappears. What replaces it is a sense of wistfulness, of diffuse desire, and the insistent thought that one's hair might look better longer, and swept forward.
As my lawyers will attest, I have endured sleepless nights since hearing this insinuating ditty. I have become unable to concentrate on work, which has begun to suffer. My smile has improved - to be fair - and I now wear high-top basketball boots. I have not done the latter since the 80s.
But I am not alone. There were thousands of similarly afflicted individuals at Madison Square Garden the other day when I visited there with two New Zealanders, Tori Sussex and Silvia Avila. Justin Bieber was holding a concert.
Tori and Silvia, two students from Carmel College on Auckland's North Shore, had won a contest to meet the faun himself. They were excited, playful, and fortunate enough to have indulgent mothers. Tori's mother confessed to a phase of preoccupation with David Cassidy in her teens.
Sadly, neither Tori nor Silvia were particularly indulgent of their mothers when they were dancing to Baby in their hotel.
Bieber has something. He's more than a haircut and a squeak. He's a sign that no one ever went broke glamourising an identifiable but significant phase of life, in this case those years just before teenage confusion, awkwardness and cynicism descend. He's a sign that these kids have access to money, and plenty of it. Log onto BieberFever.com and you'll find invocations to prove your love for the Beebs by signing up. Your heyday just got monetarised.
I've just finished reading A Short History of Celebrity by Fred Inglis. He locates the rise of celebrity as the byproduct of historic and philosophic forces, rather than moral decay. Inglis traces the origin of celebrity - in part - to the life and work of painter Joshua Reynolds who cemented the notion of a life lived in, and validated by, public attention. He was one of the first celebrities as we understand the term. Lord Byron was a celebrity. So, in his way, was Adolf Hitler.
Celebrities are people who embody feelings we can't express, for reasons of social organisation, modernity, and technology.
All of this has been in my head as I've gone in and out of the offices of "Sue, Grabbit & Runne". I don't imagine my suit against TVNZ will get far, but it might garnish some attention.
That will do nicely.
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