Three years ago, Justin Bieber was busking for money to go to DisneyWorld. Then he appeared on YouTube, and now he’s the biggest pop sensation since Michael Jackson. Jon Ronson asks him about the bad days, girls and whether it’s true he doesn’t know what a German isThursday afternoon, San José, California. Justin Bieber sits in a dressing room that’s usually home to theSan José Sharks hockey team. But there are 23 Sharks and only one of him – a tiny boy in a huge room, empty but for a sofa, a documentary-maker pointing a camera at me (Jon M Chu, director of Step Up 3D, now making Justin Bieber Never Say Never 3D), his press man Mike, and his Xbox. He has, I notice, chosen for his Xbox avatar a small black girl wearing a plaid skirt.
Jon M Chu’s 3D camera is capturing a circumspect, anxious me. My anxiety is due to the fact that Justin – being only 16 and by far the biggest teen star in the world, probably the biggest since Michael Jackson – tends to rattle off overly polished maxims in interviews, such as these from his newly published autobiography, First Step 2 Forever: My Story:
“Every one of my fans is so special to me… It all happened because of you. I wake up knowing I have the best fans in the world… My team is my family and they all deserve their time to shine too…”
This guardedness is understandable given the millions of anti-Biebers out there, ready to pounce on any misstep, although they’re a drop in the ocean compared with the billions of Beliebers in the world, a Belieber being – according to the Urban Dictionary – “A person who loves Justin Bieber & beliebes in everything that he can do”. According to Twitter, 3% of all their traffic is Belieber-related, with servers all over the world dedicated to Justin and his fans. In July he overtook Lady Gaga as the most searched-for person on the web.
I haven’t got long alone with Justin and I’m worried that there won’t be time to burrow beneath the platitudes and find some (with any luck) fascinating darkness.
“Which funny YouTube videos have you been watching lately?” I ask him.
“There’s one called Scarlet Takes A Tumble that’s really funny,” he says. “This woman’s on a table and she’s singing and all of a sudden she stands on the edge and flips over and falls. It’s really funny.”
“What about Charlie Bit My Finger?” I ask him.
“Not really that funny,” he says. “You think Charlie Bit My Finger is funny?”
“I do,” I say.
Justin shrugs. “To Americans and Canadians it’s just funny because of their English accents.” He pauses. “There’s a video called Arab Screaming that’s really funny. It’s an Arabian guy who starts screaming. It’s just hilarious. You should see it. Go.”
I ask Justin if he ever looks at his own YouTube videos. He says while he understands the perils of Googling himself, he does sometimes read the comments. ” ‘You’re so stupid’, ‘Your song sucks’, I even get, ‘You’re gay’ for no apparent reason. What’s the point of that? But then I remember there’s so many people who like my videos who don’t even comment. When I like a video I don’t waste my time commenting. But people who hate you – they’re going to take time to hate you.”
He is somewhere in the midst of an 85-date tour. A row of buses is parked back in the loading bay. They drive in convoy through the night from city to city, carrying Justin and a vast army of grown-ups. I see them backstage: anxious-looking men wearing suits and holding clipboards, grizzled roadies. Earlier I watched Justin weave in and out of them on his Segway.
“Does all the travel make you feel lost?” I ask.
“You’re so far away,” he nods, “and you start feeling like you’re a robot. When I’m overseas the schedule is always crazy and then there’s the time change and you’re not even yourself. It’s weird.”
“Do you ever feel wistful for the days before you were famous?” I ask.
At this Justin looks as if it’s all getting too introspective. “I’m a regular person,” he says hurriedly. “I’m living my dream and I’m just enjoying every minute of it.
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