4 September 2015
I had just got undressed when I looked out the window and saw Justin Bieber right outside. His visit to Bushy Park in Dublin to shoot some hoops in June 2017 was one of Ireland’s more unexpected celeb-sighting stories. The basketball court in Bushy Park happens to be just beside the men’s changing room of the athletics club I run with, you see, and I was getting ready for our regular Tuesday evening training session with no inkling of the pop hysteria about to unfold outside. Pretty soon, news had spread. I hadn’t seen teenagers descend on Bushy Park of a summer evening with such haste, numbers and hormones since Leaving Cert results night.
A few years earlier I had seen similar scenes one Sunday afternoon outside the Hôtel Le Bristol in Paris, where Justin Bieber was rumoured to be staying. “Juu-stan! Juu-stan!”, the small group of French teens gathered on the Rue de Rivoli called out hopefully towards the upper windows. If he was there, he didn’t show while I was passing; maybe that’s a privilege he reserves for the young people of leafy southside Dublin.
Justin Bieber had already been a teen-idol superstar for a long time before 2015 – ‘Baby’ had reached no. 7 in Ireland as far back as 2010. ‘What Do You Mean?’, though, feels like his breakthrough as a pop act with chart-topping clout rather than just an Internet sensation. Streaming probably helped, by converting the massive online fervour of Beliebers repeatedly playing their boy’s tracks round-the-clock into quantifiable sales equivalents. For grown-ups, Bieber’s public image as a spoilt brat—including an infamous note in the visitor book of the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam that he hoped Anne Frank would have been a Belieber—gave him the sort of low-level celebrity notoriety that’s always useful for keeping a pop star’s profile on a constant simmer.
What also helped is that ‘What Do You Mean?’ is a decent track. The tropical house combination of EDM beats, dancehall rhythm and Balearic vibe is done with an agreeably light touch, the fashionable-for-mid-’10s bleepy trance hook is catchy without being naggy, and Bieber’s featherlight vocal here is also easy on the ear. I wouldn’t call this track classic or memorable, and it wouldn’t have been strong enough to launch a brand-new act with zero public profile. However, as celeb-pop content with a bit more substance than the Bieber machine heretofore required or deserved, ‘What Do You Mean?’ is alright, and we’ll have two more chart-toppers from him in short order for comparison.
Now if you don’t mind, this is a men’s locker room and I’m putting on my short-shorts here.
