From Hate To Faith; My Life As A Belieber

It’s easy to look at Justin Bieber and think he’s an idiot, let’s not forget his antics, throwing eggs at his neighbours, spitting on his fans, vomiting on stage, storming off in various interviews and public appearances and keeping his dedicated fans waiting a rather long time on a school night. The list is endless. However the teen sensation made potentially one of the biggest comebacks ever last year when he revamped his image and released his album, ‘Purpose’ with every track being a complete banger.

I look back to how I used to feel towards him, an embarrassment, a total tool and liking him would drag your musical street cred through the gutter. But now for some reason he’s my secret crush and I’ve had, ‘Love Yourself’ stuck in my head for the last month. He made two appearances on James Cordens,‘Carpool Karaoke’, and actually made me laugh and even made light of the unfortunate photos taken of him last year whilst on his holidays. I knew at this point it was starting to happen, I was starting to become a Beliber and there was nothing I could do about it.

The latest album, ‘Purpose’ is great and I have found that the people who don’t agree haven’t actually listened to it, I’m not by any means saying that it’s the next Dark Side of the Moon, but if we take it for what it’s meant to be, a catchy pop album, then it’s killing it. But why do people still turn their noses up at him?

A lot of people don’t like it because he doesn’t write his own music and that is fair enough but then nor did Elvis Presley. It happens all the time, every song on Adele’s album is co-written so finding a completely genuine mainstream artist that’s written everything without a little help is pretty hard to come by now a-days. You could also blame his previous bratty attitude and this air of entitlement that he seems to have about himself, let’s not forget the cringe-worthy interview with a Spanish radio station last year where poor Bieber gets a little lost in translation and after 7 whole minutes of not understanding the questions decided to put his headphones in and walk out.

His choice of t-shirt has also been heavily scrutinized after he was photographed wearing a Metallica t-shirt on a chat show and got a whole load of back-lash by a load of keyboard bashers on twitter. But who’s to say Lars Ulric himself doesn’t own a copy of Purpose, I mean probably not, but stranger things have happened. And to be brutally honest Metallica probably don’t care that Bieber had their t-shirt on and why should they really? The thing is we have all done it, worn t-shirts of bands we don’t know or worn a pair of Vans trainers and have never actually picked up a skateboard. It’s just branding.

Bieber has also landed himself in the firing line for the rather outrageous comparisons he makes to himself. If you type into Google ‘Justin Bieber compares himself to…..’ it will throw up Jesus, Kurt Cobain and The Beatles. However when you actually start delving a little deeper he didn’t say he was like Jesus he just said he wanted to live his life like him. With the comparison to Cobain again I can’t actually find any evidence of him saying it just a meme someone’s made. However in an interview for NME he does compare ‘Sorry’ to ‘Let it Be’, Ok so this is pretty outrageous but I suppose him saying stuff like this probably got Sorry 100’s more plays than it did before. Coming out with this kind of controversial gibberish keeps you in the public eye and keeps the haters hating and your fans loyal.

Look, I’m not saying go out and buy ten copies of the album and lovingly plaster your wall with posters, I’m just saying appreciate him for what he is, the polished pop star. We are criticising him in the wrong way; he isn’t trying to be some raw, emotional singer songwriter that’s crooning about his hardships he just wants to sing catchy tunes. A lot of the rather silly things he says and does keep him in the public eye, lots of artists do it, that's probably one of the reasons they become mega stars. Keeping public interest. So it happened, I went to bed and woke up in the morning with the sudden realisation that I was in fact a beliber and there was nothing I could do about it, and to be honest it doesn’t really bother me.