While I'm not a creepy male adult super-fan, I do appreciate the pop song "Baby" and I appreciate 'Bieber the celebrity'. I have a vague interest in seeing him continue to do well and/or fail miserably in some scandalous way. To give you better context, I have a similarly strong interest in the goings-on of the frontman of the alt-rock band Toadies, the only difference here is that massmedia pretty much decides for me how much 'data' related to these two individuals I am going to consume. To put it another way: I sort of want to know about Bieber and Todd Lewis equally, but neither of them inspires me to seek information on a regular basis. Probably the only difference between me and one of the screaming idiots at The Garden last night is that I don't hold the internet/media constantly inundating us with Bieber material against him.
So as you can probably see, this issue is actually much larger than Bieber. Bieber is a symbol for a very prevalent, very modern problem. While children who enjoy danceable music with decent melodies enjoy Justin Bieber for all the right reasons, a large portion of the adult world hates him for no good reason at all. Bieber is popular on three levels:
Level 1 - Authentic (favorable): Mostly children, some fully-realized adults who like bubblegum pop and spend a copious amount of time outdoors, pedophiles.
Level 2 - Ironic (neutral): Internet-based fandom, enjoy the 'idea of Bieber'/'Bieber the meme', intricate to but not solely responsible for the development of Level 3.
Level 3 - Confused (negative): My mom, 95% of the people at the Knicks game last night, any adult who can't fathom the 'hugeness' of Bieber and thus react to Bieber and the 'idea of Bieber' in a mostly negative way.
It's normal for people to want to be against what is enormously popular. Humans have been trying to act contrarian in order to feign coolness for years. For a long time, authentic support of [entity x] was only coupled by this desire to reject it based on the volume of its popularity. When people liked something ironically it was called a 'guilty pleasure' or 'so bad it's good'. This type of ironic appreciation for things is not new (and still 'thrives' to some degree), but it was never capable (via the internet, and something I'll call the 'meme of memes') of dramatically skewing large segments' opinion on cultural figures and ideas.
The Meme of Memes© is the idea that, while memes have existed at least as long as concepts such as modernity, they have--in the last 1-4 years--become capable of subconsciously infiltrating large chunks of humanity (a majority amount) who remain otherwise unaware of their existence, ie while my mom has never seen (something like) this
she wholeheartedly agrees with the sentiment which it conveys: Bieber is a "punk", worthy only of our scorn and ridicule (and the fact that you may or may not find the song "Baby" enjoyable--which my mom does--is an afterthought compared to how this Meme of Memes© is telling you to feel). Because what about Bieber is actually so offensive?
His haircut gets a lot of shit but it's nothing compared to someone like Willow Smith. The haircut is essential though in terms of promoting Bieber's status as a Meme of Memes©: it's subtly strange and horrendous. There's nothing behind Willow Smith's hairdo, it's just weird. It ends there. With Bieber, it's all about motives. If you have crazy pink hair, you are simply stating something very obvious: I have crazy pink hair and that is strange. But to have a haircut like Bieber's is to inspire people to ask why someone would want their hair to look like that.
I tried to get my mom to clarify her "Justin Bieber is a punk" comment, but she was incapable of articulating beyond what felt like stock answers. She did site his hair and the way he "carries himself" but the entire her-end of the conversation felt like a cliche based on what I already knew to be the popular (Level 3) opinion. I'm not sure how I feel about the notion that, even at this very moment, people are doing things on the internet for no other reason then because they are absurd and stupid and 'seem' funny, and that these people and these things will (without a doubt) directly influence someone like my mom, who does not even check email.
We are reaching a saturation point where the true death of irony is not unreachable. At some point soon, this thing in western culture has to break. We will have only content and absurd content (which can be original and/or reactionary). If this sounds weird and confusing it's only because it is literally impossible to describe with words. When irony is finally gone forever, it will not leave a void. It will be replaced by something that doesn't have a name yet to describe it. Think back to the last time you enjoyed something ironically or the last time you authentically enjoyed something that seemed ironic. Think about that feeling in the terms of how you would define "ironic," or more simply, how contemplating irony is 'supposed' to feel. You might, in some vague way, be experiencing a thought that sort of looks like ≠.
I really don't know much, but those boos last evening at MSG were definitely not ironic.
Follow @vernonhowl on Twitter.
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