{"id":2436,"date":"2016-04-24T21:53:08","date_gmt":"2016-04-24T21:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattralston.net\/?p=2436"},"modified":"2016-04-27T01:46:09","modified_gmt":"2016-04-27T01:46:09","slug":"biebers-love-sucks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/music\/biebers-love-sucks\/","title":{"rendered":"Bieber&#8217;s Love Yourself Raises Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oyEuk8j8imI\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had the displeasure of listening to this stupid ass song on multiple occasions because I put it on my playlist.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s actually <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nbcnewyork.com\/blogs\/nonstop-sound\/Rutgers-Researchers--124654364.html\" target=\"_blank\">a formula<\/a> behind the music played on\u00a0corporate radio.<\/p>\n<p>I know what you&#8217;re thinking: Wouldn&#8217;t having an inherent formula mean that said music is the opposite of art?<\/p>\n<p>Yes! Maybe that&#8217;s why he&#8217;s called Dr. Luke and not Professor Luke.<\/p>\n<p>Enter Justin Bieber from YouTube.<\/p>\n<p>The thing that really irritates me about this song is that it&#8217;s told from the first person\u00a0of someone who didn&#8217;t write it. You can tell, because why would this\u00a0twink have a girlfriend?<\/p>\n<p>In all seriousness it gets very meta:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t want to write a song, cause I didn&#8217;t want anyone thinking I still care, I don&#8217;t.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You didn&#8217;t write a song. Ed Sheeran and another guy wrote a song and then decided it\u00a0wasn&#8217;t good enough to record themselves\u00a0and drunkenly laughed about how fucked up it is that someone bought it.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re to assume all\u00a0songwriting which\u00a0incorporates\u00a0storytelling is inherently fictional and often metaphorical. Clearly that Neil Young imposter didn&#8217;t really ride through the desert on\u00a0a horse with no name, he would have named the horse.<\/p>\n<p>Turn the page&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In Bob Dylan&#8217;s early work he was\u00a0pretending to be a folksy hick even though he was a Jewish\u00a0dude from Minnesota.\u00a0Guys who sit on porches don&#8217;t write a ton of lyrics. You have to suspend your disbelief.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0collaborative supergroup\u00a0Bad Company mostly wrote songs about being in the band Bad Company and we were alerted to the plight of making a shitload of money touring, yet to my knowledge no song has ever broken down the barrier to the point of referencing whether or not the writer of the song you&#8217;re listening to felt like writing it or not.<\/p>\n<p>The brilliant movie Adaptation was about a screenwriter writing a movie, and especially in the nineties many rappers such as Talib Kwali and Nas rapped mostly about how good they were at rapping. This would be equivalent to stepping onto a basketball court and talking a lot of trash in a wheelchair.<\/p>\n<p>Still,\u00a0referencing your internal debate as\u00a0to whether or not to\u00a0write a song, in the lyrics of a song,\u00a0seems to have\u00a0broken down the last barrier between celebrity and art, and further, of the implicit understanding that the point of writing a song is to entertain an audience.<\/p>\n<p>Sure Nirvana and Pearl Jam wore jeans and\u00a0plaid shirts and went out of their way to act like their shitty garage band just blew up accidentally,\u00a0but that was a pushback to the hair band and payola\u00a0era.<\/p>\n<p>Entertainers do a lot of preparation if they&#8217;re any good, which is why hipster comedians who memorize their act and pretend to work off a notebook are exceptionally offensive.<\/p>\n<p>Love Yourself appears to be a push back to the act of songwriting. The lyrics aren&#8217;t presented as striving to entertain an audience, but for\u00a0the means of\u00a0the writer to achieve peace of mind and get back at some chick. It&#8217;s like how\u00a0reality TV was a pushback to the act of making television. (The need to make good TV is diminished with less competition. Hence, mega conglomerate media mergers lead to Keeping Up with the Kardashians. It&#8217;s cheap.)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s tough to separate the actual Justin Bieber from the character\u00a0the writers are\u00a0portraying. Clearly it&#8217;s not the real Justin Bieber, because Justin Bieber can&#8217;t write songs and the author of the song says he wrote it, yet the\u00a0lyrics definitely seek to portray the actual Bieber in order to capitalize on his celebrity\u00a0and I assume\u00a0the audience is supposed to\u00a0believe this is a meditation on his actual life.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ve been &#8220;so caught up in your job?&#8221;\u00a0If we&#8217;re to suspend disbelief and assume Bieber actually wrote this song, isn&#8217;t writing the song you&#8217;re currently singing, as a songwriter, part of your\u00a0fucking job?<\/p>\n<p>Love Yourself is a first person constructed narrative of\u00a0Bieber\u00a0dwelling on writing a song.<\/p>\n<p>So, like a reality show, but, a song.<\/p>\n<p>Couldn&#8217;t remember the best song in the world, this is a tribute. That type of thing.<\/p>\n<p>In the Selfie Era, the\u00a0definition of success\u00a0is attaining\u00a0it without doing any actual work. Having wealthy parents is really the only way to accomplish this, I guess that&#8217;s the secret.<\/p>\n<p>Let the old money die and keep making the sex tapes, you&#8217;re doing the country a service by ceasing the cycle of success and snorting away the inheritance, nobody&#8217;s role model should have herpes.<\/p>\n<p>What could better exemplify\u00a0the Selfie\u00a0mentality than a songwriter (Sheeran), writing from the perspective of\u00a0his less talented peer (Bieber), and disclosing in the lyrics that he actually\u00a0isn&#8217;t sure if\u00a0he wanted to write the fucking song that you&#8217;re listening to\u00a0or not? Is Sheeran possibly taking a jab at Bieber or is he doing him a favor by allowing him to\u00a0say that he actually\u00a0wrote a song, knowing much of the audience assumes as much.<\/p>\n<p>In closing, the song and its Casio sax solo and over produced three chord progression\u00a0sucks donkey balls, so if you have to ask, yeah, you shouldn&#8217;t have written the song Ed and your butt buddy should stop posing.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had the displeasure of listening to this stupid ass song on multiple occasions because I put it on my playlist. There&#8217;s actually a formula behind the music played on\u00a0corporate radio. I know what you&#8217;re thinking: Wouldn&#8217;t having an inherent formula mean that said music is the opposite of art? Yes! Maybe that&#8217;s why he&#8217;s &#8230;<a class=\"post-readmore\" href=\"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/music\/biebers-love-sucks\/\">read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[712],"tags":[972,962],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2436"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2445,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions\/2445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}