This weekend I spoke with a longtime Justin Bieber fan who is hurtling toward her 30th birthday, and she confirmed a concern I had: "I feel a little silly saying I'm a Justin Bieber fan at 30." I wish to ask: why does this need to be the case? Indeed I do not think her situation is unique, and throughout the course of our conversation she confided that the feeling was not necessarily new either; a slight sense of shame has accompanied her fandom for the majority of the years she has been on this Earth. Nonetheless my takeaway was that she in no way regrets her fandom, and indeed from everything I can ascertain it seems like that fandom has been a positive force in her life. So why feel silly about being a fan of one of the world's biggest pop stars?

To answer that question I am going to range quite far in this post, covering both my own experience with Justin Bieber, and the experience of the fan I spoke to. But I will also strive to put Bieber in historical context, stretching back not just to Beetlemania but back to Medieval times and beyond, and furthermore we will touch on issues of religion, psychology, economics, and more.

Yesterday I had her send me a playlist on which she put 43 of her favorite Bieber tracks, and I dutifully listened to... the large majority of them. I tried, I really tried. Let me go no further without mentioning that I do genuinely enjoy some of the man's music! I can say after yesterday's immersive listening session that 2015's Purpose is my favorite Bieber album, and indeed it is still the only one I have listened to in full, having listened to it several times when it first came out (perhaps more on how that happened in a future post). The Skrillex production credits on that album have a lot to do with that, though I also can see looking at the broad sweep of Justin's career that Purpose marked a turning point in terms of the maturity and depth of his songwriting, and I overall enjoy the songs from the past decade more than the breakout songs that the true Beliebers first fell in love with.

About those early tracks: what stands out to me most is that on a song like 2009's "One Less Lonely Girl," Bieber is singing directly to you. You can be the One Less Lonely Girl if you let him into your world. This is not how I normally experience music; when I listen to an artist I generally understand that they are expressing some feeling or experience about their own life, or telling a story, they are not singing to me, the listener, they are at most singing for me, though more often I am to understand that they are singing for themselves and I should simply be grateful that I get to enjoy an outsider's view of their self expression. It seems to me that what Bieber offers to his fans is a direct emotional connection, the knowledge that the artist-to-fan relationship is at the core of his artistry.

The Case In Favor

It is through this lens that I interpret his 2021 hit "Anyone" as a love letter not just to his wife but to the fans. "If it's not you it's not anyone, looking back on my life you're the only good I've ever done," whether it was his intention or not I believe that this line applies equally as well to his fans as to his wife. Is that the case? Has the Biebs indeed been a positive force in the life of his fans? There is an idea out there in our culture that he may not have been. That his music, especially the early music, was worthless pop drivel engineered in a lab to make young girls swoon and get their parents to spend money on CDs, merch, and concert tickets. I am in fact willing to grant some variant of this premise. Yes, Bieber was discovered by Scooter Braun who recognized in him a potential moneymaker, and the songs he put out were the product of what is fundamentally a money-making enterprise.

I am an economist. What that means for the purpose of this post is that when I see a market transaction such as a young girl buying a CD, my default presumption is that there is something called Consumer Surplus associated with that transaction, that is, that there is legitimate value to the transaction above and beyond the sale price of the CD. At this point someone could reasonably interject that a young girl does not really know what she wants, that she is simply being manipulated by a corporation that does not have her interests as heart, but I wish to explore the possibility that perhaps 12 year old girls have more agency than such interjectors are willing to grant.

So, on what grounds do I make the case that Bieber's music has indeed been a positive force in the life of his fans? Let's think about the dating life of the true Belieber. The critic wants to suggest that Bieber fandom has negative consequences for her dating life: after all, time she spends obsessing over YouTube videos of her celebrity crush is time that she is not flirting with real flesh-and-blood boys that she likes and learning about actual romance. Indeed, our attention is a scarce and precious resource, as we are all becoming increasingly aware in the social media age. But attention spent on Bieber is not wasted: the music is enjoyed in the moment, and can still be enjoyed 15 years or 50 years later, whereas the middle school boyfriend will almost surely not work out. Supposedly the psychologists have written about this issue and generally agree that teen idols can be a safe way for young girls to explore romantic feelings without the risk inherent to real world relationships.

Again because I am an economist, lets make a financial analogy: when you manage a retirement account you have to choose an investment portfolio, and it is generally agreed that you should diversify, meaning among other things choosing a mixture of low risk assets like government bonds and higher risk but higher return assets like stocks. Bieber is the low risk asset, the real relationships are higher risk but may lead to an actual husband, and it can be perfectly reasonable to invest attention in both, and in fact this is also an example of a risk hedging strategy, because the investment in Bieber fandom might pay its highest dividends when you experience a break-up or a dry spell in your actual dating life.

But I have not yet even made the strongest case for the positive effect of Justin's music, which regards standards. I think the dominant media framing might be that the persona in his music may damage girls' psyches by creating unrealistic expectations for how attractive, talented, successful, and emotionally expressive a romantic partner should be. And indeed I am sure you could come to me with examples of superfans for whom this was true. What I believe is that there are Bieber fans, I hypothesize a majority of them though I have absolutely no data to back it up, for whom the standards for men which they had previously internalized were in fact too low.

In the case of the fan I spoke with, her parents had divorced shortly before she discovered Bieber, and in the years leading up to the divorce she had been exposed to increasingly intense exchanges of verbal abuse between her parents, sometimes spilling over to collateral damage directed at her. Speaking more broadly, approximately a quarter of children in the US grow up with an alcoholic or addicted parent. If you have a sparsity of quality male role models in your life, it seems to me that a pop star who demonstrates a model of an ambitious, talented, and emotionally available man would have an unambiguously positive impact on the standards by which you judge potential partners. Critically to my argument, and again I have absolutely no data with which to prove this, I believe that it is precisely the girls who would benefit the most from a positive male influence who would tend to be most attracted to pop heartthrobs like Bieber (in other words, people tend to find the art they need, an observation that goes back at least to Aristotle).

The Culture

The Belieber I spoke to said that she feels silly for her fandom today and even as a teenager it was a cause for potentially being made fun of. Let's look back at how our culture has responded to Bieber. I will start with my own anecdotes: I cannot remember exactly when I first learned of Bieber, but I think it may have been at some point when TMZ was on TV in my living room and he was being roundly mocked by the staff. I can vaguely recall my mom having a dismissive attitude toward him and his infamous hair, despite having been a New Kids on the Block fan in her youth.

At this point we should bring in some historical context, Bieber of course being just one recent iteration of a lineage that goes back at least to the Beatles, Elvis, and even Sinatra, and as I will argue in the following section is in fact an ancient and possibly pre-historic human phenomenon. Again, I am in the Economics and Finance department at my college, but over in the Gender Studies department, there is in fact an established literature on the teen idol phenomenon and the mainstream culture's derisive attitude toward it. Essentially, the argument is that our culture systematically devalues things that tend to be enjoyed disproportionately by women and especially young girls, particularly when there is a sexual aspect to the enjoyment. You do not need to be a devoted feminist (indeed I am not) to recognize a tinge of truth to this argument.

However, I would for now like to stay focused on Bieber in particular, not teen idols in general. I myself certainly had no respect for him circa 2010, and that was probably the only socially acceptable attitude for me to have had at the time. I think in retrospect there were at least 2 different strains of derision toward Bieber that I absorbed. One had a conservative cultural valence, and saw Bieber as a product of a liberal media industry trying to feminize our culture. The other had a progressive cultural valence, and saw Bieber as the product of a capitalist media industry trying to extract money from girls' hormones. There was a racial component as well, with the by then well-trod arguments about using a white face to traffic in some black cultural forms, though in retrospect arguably we should have been definitively past these arguments already in a post-Eminem world.

The fan I spoke to said that at the time "I found myself playing these songs for my few friends I did have at school, and they would bob  their head and smile but it often felt like they were just being nice and listening on behalf of the then friendship." Indeed, it could be a lonely experience being the only Bieber fan at school (at least the only one who would admit it), and she describes herself even today as "on an island" as it pertains to her fandom, not having any close friends who share this particular interest.

I don't feel I need to elaborate anymore on the fact that Bieber was a cultural punchline for much of the 2010s. In what remains of this already-too-long essay I wish to turn towards establishing the broader themes that I plan to explore through this publication, before ultimately tying it back to Bieber. We will start with a detour through history so that we can begin to say something about universal human desires, and then conclude with some thoughts about the position of us moderns, including but not limited to the Beliebers.

The History of Celebrity

I am basically going to assert here that the drive to admire other special human beings, and to make them out to be larger-than-life, is so persistent across history that we may as well call it a universal. Here is a brief overview of the history:

• Athletes in Ancient Greece enticed people to come see the games, and received gifts and had songs written in their honor.
• In Medieval times, Saints were widely admired, with dissemination of their likeness through the Church leading to widespread pilgrimages to sites such as Canterbury Cathedral
• Writers including the poet Lord Byron and also Charles Dickens began to experience widespread fame as the printing press and rising literacy rates transformed Britain in the 19th century.
• And to bring it all to a head, by 1966 John Lennon informed the world that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus", and in terms of the "occupying the attention spans of young people" metric he was likely correct.

It seems to me we are hardwired to admire other human beings. Of course, what is unique to the modern condition is the capability of technology to instantly disseminate the likeness and work of anyone to anywhere, which has certainly amplified and transformed the celebrity culture of today. Indeed, the Bieber fan I spoke to said that it was precisely because Bieber was discovered through YouTube that he seemed so fundamentally relatable, like a talented boy-next-door who happened to make it big.

My personal relationship to celebrity culture is a bit strange, I have never taken a particular interest in the lives and personalities of the musicians or actors whose work I enjoy. But, I believe that this human impulse to admire manifested in other domains for me, particularly in my admiration of philosophers including particularly Kant and Bertrand Russell, and the eccentric mathematician Erdös.

Modern Enchantment

It occurred to me recently that for me, having grown up entirely agnostic and secular, it feels extremely difficult to take religion seriously. And yet, like kinship networks, religion is widely understood as a cultural universal for humanity. In the words of Pascal we experience an infinite abyss, or in the modern lingo a "God-shaped hole" in our hearts. I think that maybe music ended up being the most significant area in which I learned to fill that hole. I am not saying "music is my religion" per se, but I am saying that the intense feelings of ecstatic devotion and joy which for many people both historically and today are associated with religion, are feelings that I have experienced primarily through the exploration, enjoyment and creation of music.

What I have come to suspect is that I may not be particularly unique in this regard, that indeed many of my fellow moderns living in our increasingly secularized world have likely also allowed those feelings to migrate into the domains of music, television, art, etc. The Bieber fan has experienced a particular form of this phenomenon that is not totally intelligible to me since it is so centered on an individual personality whereas my experience has centered more on a diverse array of artists and the connections between them, but I recognize enough in it to believe that it is of the same kind of experience.

A useful word for this discussion is enchantment. The sociologist Max Weber understood back in the late 19th century that the world around him was going through a process of disenchantment, as science and technology increasingly pointed to a mechanistic understanding of the cosmos with no need for the supernatural, and human society reorganized around rationalized, bureaucratic forms like the corporation, and nations began to increasingly adopt a separation of church and state. To be enchanted as I understand it is to live in a world where you understand that things you care about are deeply shaped by forces beyond your comprehension, and furthermore to feel a deep emotional connection with those forces.

In my case, I grew up with absolutely no sense of enchantment about either the physical or social world, I was to understand that all interesting matters about the world were fundamentally available to me through rational inquiry and empiricism. That is what I had absorbed on an intellectual level by the age of 14, in any case. But against this backdrop of disenchantment, I also experienced ecstasies in the world of music and dance. I think many people would describe similar experiences, including the Beliebers. Music more than any other art form has the ability to transport me to different worlds, a form of modern magic and enchantment. I think some others feel the same way about stories as told through books, TV, or movies, as Tolkien argued in 1947.

I'd like to be clear that I am not saying that Justin Bieber fandom (or Beatlemania for that matter) is a form of devil-worship or idolatry, as some of the conservative Christians would have it. What I am saying is that humans seem to possess a deep and intrinsic need to understand themselves as occupying an enchanted world, and in an increasingly secular society, those energies have for many of us migrated into the world of ostensibly-secular art. It is an open question for me whether this enchantment-through-art will be enough to carry me through the entirety of life, or whether Pascal was right that the infinite abyss can only be filled by the infinite figure of God. For now I feel strongly that exploring these ideas through the medium of music, and conversations about music, is the way forward.

Conclusion

What do you see, when you see the Belieber? The conservative evangelical Christian sees something tantamount to Devil worship. The anti-capitalist sees a naive rube being sold a worthless product. The feminist sees a girl oppressed by a patriarchal culture. What I have argued here is that you might choose to see something else: a deep and basic human need to admire, and to experience magic.

I will restate the central quotation from the fan I spoke to: "I feel a little silly saying I'm a Justin Bieber fan at 30." I have talked about a lot of Big Ideas here, and part of me wonders whether I am simply engaged in self-centered and self-aggrandizing armchair philosophizing, or whether my arguments could in fact have some practical relevance for Bieber fans (or anyone else for that matter) and how they understand themselves. I do hope that what I have written here will have some resonance beyond myself

P.S.

I would like to say that I am to some degree deeply unsatisfied with what I have written here, because much of it is closer to a manifesto or a thesis than a report on an interview. This is my first big post, and I am still establishing my point of view and the themes that I am trying to explore. I hope that if I stick with this project, future posts will be more squarely focused on the subjects whom I interview, with my ideas implicit and in the background rather than taking up most of the word count.