SOURCE: NY TIMES
Mr. Bieber, now 16, is a bona fide teen-pop dreamboat in an otherwise barren post-Jonas Brothers era, and a young dynamo who’s essentially self-made, not just affiliated with the Disney or Nickelodeon star-making machines. He’s not cheerful; he’s game.
At Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night — his first headlining show there, and a sellout — he teased the crowd with flashes of direct emotional manipulation, the sort adults would blanch at but is almost essential to ensnare their children.
“You want to get close to me?” he asked before getting strapped into a heart-shaped cage and floating out above the crowd, a pair of cameras on cranes swirling around him. “Who wants to be Justin Bieber’s girlfriend?” his D.J. asked later in the show. “Who came here to fall in love with Justin Bieber?”
Pretty much everyone, except for maybe the parents fruitlessly hoping their daughters might take a pass. During the excellent “One Less Lonely Girl” Mr. Bieber pulled a young fan onstage and presented her with flowers. “I’m going to put you first,” he sang. “I’ll show you what you’re worth.”
With promises like that, who wouldn’t want Mr. Bieber as a son-in-law? He played piano, guitar and drums, and in a pre-show advertisement, an Xbox game involving a raft. He wove a few bars of Kanye West’s “Heartless” into “Favorite Girl.” Baby photos revealed that he has always had those pillow lips. His hair was under control, not quite at its trademark volume and body, but close enough.
Singing and dancing? Less impressive. Mr. Bieber has the sketch of stardom down cold, but has yet to color heavily in between the lines. He often sings bent over, free hand held aloft as if steadying himself. His main vocals were live maybe 50 percent of the time — it was impossible to know for sure — but notably, the less clobbered he was by the artifice of production and stagecraft, the better he sounded. “Never Let You Go” and “Favorite Girl,” which he played on guitar, revealed the sweet muscularity of his voice. (A hazy video clip of a younger Mr. Bieber singing some old Justin Timberlake might be the best he’s ever sounded.)
The show was being filmed for an as-yet-untitled biopic by Jon Chu, who directed the recent “Step Up 3D.” Before the performance Mr. Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, led the crowd in synchronized hand gestures. The several thousand young girls and their parents happily complied. “Security guys, put the hearts up,” Mr. Braun said. “You don’t have to be so macho.”
Mr. Bieber and Mr. Braun haven’t always had such an amiable relationship with security guards. Mr. Braun was arrested in connection with the scheduled appearance by Mr. Bieber at a Long Island mall last November that turned chaotic.
But the time when Mr. Bieber’s powers extended only to malls feels like eons ago. He’s a broad enough phenomenon that he’s no longer a fixed idea; everybody creates the Bieber he wants. After a conversation with Mr. Bieber over Twitter last month, Mr. West cobbled together a remix of “Runaway Love” featuring, of all people, the Wu-Tang Clan éminence grise Raekwon, that teased out Mr. Bieber’s inner Ralph Tresvant. An electronic-music producer, Shamantis, stretched out Mr. Bieber’s “U Smile” into a 35-minute moan, all wind drag and hypnotic hollow echo; Mr. Bieber gave him a thumbs up on Twitter.
Not all of Mr. Bieber’s harnessing of the power of the Internet has been for good. Last month he posted on Twitter the number of a teenager who had hacked the phone of a friend of his, passing it off as his own. The teenager later posted to YouTube a hilarious video of the resulting call and text deluge.
It was a schoolboy prank, retaliating for another schoolboy prank. But mostly Mr. Bieber understands how to cultivate his fans, and his image, online. “That Should Be Me” was accompanied by clips of homemade videos of young women singing the song back to Mr. Bieber, including one young woman in a hijab and purple glasses.
His Filipino-American backup singers, Legaci, were discovered via a cover version of Mr. Bieber’s “Baby” that they’d posted on YouTube. (The group’s interlude, during which it sang a medley of current hits — Usher’s “OMG,” B.O.B.’s “Nothin’ on You” and the like — underwhelmed.)
It was a welcome gesture, but was one of a handful of bits that made this show feel overlong. Mr. Bieber played almost the entirety of his small catalog — a 2009 EP, “My World” (RBMG/Island), and an album from this year, “My World 2.0” — including limp numbers like “Up” and “Down to Earth.”
Those are also among Mr. Bieber’s slower songs, which leave his sometimes thin voice unprotected. He fared better on rowdier numbers like “Bigger,” “Baby” and “One Time,” songs in which he showed himself to be a direct heir of two-plus decades of uptempo R&B, spanning from Michael Jackson (who filled up the pre-show playlist) to New Jack Swing to Auto-Tune, streamlined for pop ears.
Or sometimes not: the slick “Runaway Love” sounded as if it could have been a record by the pioneering ’80s R&B group Guy, and the gentle “That Should Be Me” was Boyz II Men-esque. In the case of “U Smile” Mr. Bieber just went ahead and got the actual Boyz II Men to sing back-up (the extant three-fourths of them anyhow).
Afterward he told them, “My mom, she raised me on you guys.” Then, as a gift to her, he led them in a few bars of their hit “On Bended Knee,” though he looked a bit flustered when they asked him what key to sing it in, and he sounded a bit flustered when singing it in the key they landed on.
Usher, his mentor, joined him for the remix of “Somebody to Love,” inadvertently highlighting Mr. Bieber’s still-studying awkwardness as a dancer through his own effortless motion, and paternally picking him up off the stage at the end of the song.
There were also appearances from Sean Kingston on “Eenie Meenie,” Jaden Smith (Will’s son) on “Never Say Never” and Ludacris on “Baby.” All the guests were black performers except for Miley Cyrus, who sang radiantly on “Overboard.” Perhaps the least soul-influenced contemporary pop singer, she struck a pointed contrast with Mr. Bieber: she, a longtime child star already on her third or fourth identity, dressed in grown-up black, her hair coiffed just so; and he, still working through his eager naïf phase. She remained poised even as he pawed at her arm.
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