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In the course of Justin Bieber’s nearly twenty-year career, his music has come to be somewhat immaterial to his celebrity. For many, he is an almost Kardashian-like figure, whose songs are encountered in environments of poor taste: the grocery store, an Uber, a child’s birthday party. Controversy follows him, as does tabloid coverage of these controversies, which often have a paternalistic bent: Is he back on drugs? Has his marriage to the model Hailey Bieber soured? Is he mentally ill? Is he spending enough time with his newborn son? He’s been charged with a D.U.I., acknowledged suicidal ideation, and berated paparazzi for bothering him at the beach. He’s everywhere, all the time: the Met Gala, a Comedy Central roast, the N.H.L. All-Star Game, Ellen DeGeneres’s couch, TMZ and Page Six headlines, social-media feeds and television screens, his highly publicized personal life a piece of public domain that’s never not in demand. It’s hard to say what’s more exhausting: being Justin Bieber or being even moderately privy to the discourse surrounding Justin Bieber.
As for his music, he is, at thirty-one years old, one of the most accomplished pop stars ever, though he’s certainly never been mistaken for an auteur. (He’s perhaps best known for a hook that he crooned as an adolescent: baby, baby, baby, oh.) His talent is undeniable, genuinely prodigal, but he’s struggled to channel his gifts into meaningful art, to escape the interests of the industrial music complex and develop a sound unbeholden to charts and trends. Bieber’s catalogue is searching and uneven, flitting between glossy renditions of trap-pop, mid-tempo R. & B., eighties new wave, campfire Christian sing-alongs, Afrobeat, and dancehall, his slick, supple voice skimming the surface of these styles while never committing to any of them. His stylistic malleability is mostly a strength; he can competently trade bars with Young Thug and Travis Scott in one breath, sing an aching piano ballad in another, then effortlessly belt a song-of-the-summer hook over E.D.M.-infected Tropicália. But he’s never made a great album, not even a very good one. Until recently, it seemed unlikely that he ever would.
Last Friday, Bieber released his seventh studio album, “SWAG,” without any accompanying singles, music videos, or interviews. It was a surprise drop, with Bieber forgoing the anticipatory hype campaign and presale ploys that have become typical in the lead-up to a new pop record. It did not, however, arrive without pretext. For months, rumors of drug use and marital strife have hounded Bieber, fuelled in part by his unfettered, erratic online posting, which has included screenshots of text exchanges with friends turned enemies and typed-out screeds about being “broken” and having “anger issues.” When he emerged in public, he was gaunt and hollow-eyed, unsmiling and stern—clear indicators, to fans and reporters alike, that he was unwell. “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, is it?” he said, aggrieved, to a photographer outside Soho House, in Malibu, a clip whose virality only inflamed the tabloid drama and concern trolling. If anything, the frenzy around Bieber’s apparent slow-motion crash-out captured a particular quality of his fame: the world believes he belongs to them because the world believes it raised him, having seen him blossom from preteen prodigy to troubled, tattooed adult. Every post, every public appearance, is thus grounds for psychoanalysis, a reaction that Bieber seems to both cultivate and revile. “SWAG” dropped on streaming platforms amid this maelstrom, with promotional billboards in Times Square, Los Angeles, and Reykjavík capitalizing on the recent upswell of attention. “It’s not clocking to you,” one reads; another shows a black-and-white portrait of Bieber standing with his wife and child.
While he is not the first artist to spurn the traditional promotional playbook for a surprise release—Beyoncé famously dropped her eponymous album in 2013 without warning, and many have since followed suit—the gesture feels particularly meaningful for Bieber considering his place within the pop-star firmament. In 2023, it was announced that he sold his share of the rights to his catalogue for a reported two hundred million dollars and cut ties with his longtime manager Scooter Braun, making a clean break from the corporate entities that he’d been indentured to since childhood. For years, Bieber bucked against the cage of corporate pop stardom, but he had yet to unlock the door and walk out. Now he has, at least for the moment. “SWAG” revels in this newfound freedom, with a revitalized Bieber in full command of his unique musical talents. The record delivers on years of promise and potential; it feels, miraculously, like his long-awaited magnum opus.
For listeners hoping to earn a diaristic or documentarian view into Bieber’s internal life or public dramas, the album will surely disappoint. But who would want such narrativizing from Bieber, anyway? On past records, when he attempted to reckon with his controversies and repent for his sins, the admissions felt like generalized atonements meant to placate an audience of millions, not specific reflections aimed at healing or understanding. (“It’s hard to do the right thing when the pressure’s coming down like lightning,” he sang, in 2015.) Aside from a few conversational interludes featuring the comedian Druski, which aim to comedically, or clunkily, say aloud what everyone’s been wondering—Is Bieber appropriating Black culture? Is he emotionally stable? What does “standing on business” even mean?—“SWAG” instead revels in carnal bliss and spontaneity. Bieber often doesn’t need to say anything to generate transcendent feeling. The title track, for instance, devotes its bridge to chanting and mumbling the phrase “swag on me,” and it’s somehow one of the record’s most thrilling moments. “Too Long,” a slow jam about the anticipation of sex, thrashes with toms and snare fills that swarm around chunky synth chords and fiery electric guitar—yet it’s Bieber’s voice, his cooing and moaning, his soaring, mesmeric ad-libs, that impart an ambiguous profundity to the track. The writing isn’t writing, per se, but horny provocations—“when you do me like that, it’s hard to take”—and yet the longing is palpable, operating at a frequency beyond language.
A key to the record’s success is its analog, out-of-the-box ethic. To achieve this, Bieber brought on a team of producers and artists who had little to no prior collaborative experience with him but whose backgrounds aligned with, and likely influenced, this newfound musical philosophy. Among them are Dijon and Mk.gee, a pair of freewheeling musical wizards whose respective solo albums, “Absolutely” and “Two Star & the Dream Police,” have quietly guided pop and R. & B. toward a more homespun, lo-fi sound. An active tension in contemporary pop music is the chasm between hyper-computerized, aggressively manipulated production and the making of “real music” created with “real instruments,” an Americana, folk-evoking earthiness that appeals to fans of authenticity, or at least the traditional, outmoded, construction of it. For the former, think Charli XCX’s “BRAT” or the recent rise of Tate McRae and Addison Rae’s Y2K pop; for the latter, think Zach Bryan, Noah Kahan, or even the cult fervor of Big Thief, all of whose music recalls a time when computers were merely the stuff of science fiction. What makes Dijon and Mk.gee’s music particularly innovative in this current moment, then, is how the pair weaves the electronic and organic together, creating an interplay that’s neither nostalgic nor futuristic—it’s the sound of right now.
Although Dijon and Mk.gee earn only a handful of writing and production credits—Mk.gee is listed as a writer and producer on “Daisies,” while Dijon duets with Bieber on “Devotion” and nets co-writing credits on several other songs—their fingerprints are all over “SWAG,” even when their names are not attached to a given track. “Glory Voice Memo” and “Zuma House” are scrappily recorded and unprocessed, Bieber’s soulful voice wide open and creaky, careening into some of the most heart-wrenching melodies he’s ever sung. Here, Dijon and Mk.gee’s fast and free, follow-your-gut songwriting and recording style are adopted, and it infuses Bieber’s music with a sense of aliveness. “He’s searching,” Mk.gee told the Times last fall, when he broke the news that he was working with Bieber. “Anything that comes out of his mouth: That’s pop music. You can really do pretty wild stuff behind that, just because it represents something.” And it shows: Bieber has never sounded this wild, this expansive, this connected to something true.
This wildness does not mean that “SWAG” is unfocussed or scatterbrained. Even at twenty-one songs, the album cannot be cast off as a data dump or as streaming bait, because it coheres into something whole, a magnetic statement of purpose. By stepping outside the hard right angles of conventional pop music, Bieber has landed on a sensual, slow-burning sound that seems to have always been waiting for him, an off-balance indie R. & B. that eschews perfection and sugar-rush ease in exchange for primacy and patience, traits mostly alien to the Bieber œuvre. Carter Lang and Dylan Wiggins serve as the record’s lead producers, and they populate songs with roomy percussion redolent of nineties neo-soul, warm synth keys, and limber guitar licks that crest into subtly layered choruses. Bieber’s voice is frequently wielded as an instrument; some of “SWAG” ’s finest moments arrive in the form of sneaky drops and climaxes, with Bieber’s voice pitched and fragmented in surprising ways, such as on the drum-and-bass-indebted “405,” or on the post-chorus breakdown of the Gunna-assisted “Way It Is.”
This is all rather unfamiliar territory for Bieber, whose past releases have been overwrought with forced narrative frameworks and blocky, puerile songwriting. 2021’s “Justice,” for instance, sampled snippets of Martin Luther King, Jr., speeches, as if to tie a central theme or message together. But “Justice” is not about justice or racial equality, nor does it home in on anything specific or salient in King’s words—it is a big-budget, festival-ready record with no anchor, drifting exuberantly from genre du jour to genre du jour; its primary themes are loving and letting go. On 2020’s “Changes,” Bieber sang surface-level odes to monogamy and maturity over monochromatic R. & B., a consistency in production and theme that felt oppressive rather than coherent. Despite the album being an outdated medium used to assess modern artistry, Bieber’s prior lack of success with the form feels relevant considering he came of age when albums still mattered, in a time when holding an audience spellbound for forty-odd minutes, rather than forty-odd seconds, established an artist as worthy of respect. “SWAG” succeeds on the terms that all good albums do—through cohesion, refinement, and curation—and, critically, doesn’t take itself too seriously. Full of light and ease, sex and yearning, it’s the first Bieber album to hover above his noisy celebrity, to make a case for his own specificity. He’s not repenting or apologizing or trying to earn respect; he’s singing until all the words stop making sense, until the melodies say something that his lyrics and social-media posts can’t.
To believe in Justin Bieber is to believe in the mythology of greatness; to root for his success is to root for a once-in-a-generation talent fulfilling his destiny. Yet depending on how one looks at it, Bieber has already fulfilled his destiny, exceeding any reasonable expectations one could have held for him when he débuted as a teen-ager, in 2009. Similar to Miley Cyrus, another former child star who has endured intense media scrutiny and the burden of big expectations, Bieber’s talent has long suggested he was more than a carnival act and chart-topping front man, that somewhere along the road of controversy, failed genre experimentation, and shameless hit-chasing resided a creative life, and artistic output, less encumbered by the demands of the music business. “SWAG” represents a headlong descent into this life, and it encompasses all the messiness, bliss, confusion, and beauty that being reborn at this scale entails. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
