Man in the mirror

The lingering image of Justin Bieber singing to himself at the Grammys

Of all the current events to feel haunted by, my brain has chosen Justin Bieber singing to his reflection in his underwear on Grammy night.

He’s been loitering in the back of my mind for a solid month — mauve guitar, loop pedal, MPC, boxer shorts, ankle socks, everything doubled in a frameless mirror you’d otherwise expect to see in a Francis Bacon painting. On repeat in my head, this nationally televised rendition of “Yukon” continues to deform my sense of time, especially when I go back and check the math: I first interviewed Bieber in late 2009, a few months before the release of his debut album, My World 2.0. Somehow, on that December afternoon, I was two years younger than Justin Bieber is today. Was anything meaningful communicated between us? I understood why he loved Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” but not why he was already annoyed with being famous. I’ve struggled to understand him since.

But on Grammy night, I felt like I finally did. Over the past decade, Bieber has all but cemented his place in the popular consciousness as an adult brat who resents his celebrity more than we do. Now, here he was, in his socks and tattoos, asking the world to watch him serenade himself in a mirror. It happened near the center of the telecast, with Bieber wandering into a single spotlight, strumming the “Yukon” riff into his loop pedal, tapping out the kick pattern on his MPC, then singing his cut-and-paste seduction poetry over these repetitions as if locking himself inside his own song. What felt like a joke on the vulnerability and overexposure of pop fame quickly transformed into an act of artful hostility. On this starry night of music industry togetherness and bonhomie, Justin Bieber would be alone.

I wouldn’t have been so surprised had I not ignored Swag and Swag II, the two albums Bieber dropped last summer. Swag has been described as his great liberation from the conjoined pressures of bad management and audience expectations. Swag II has been dismissed as the droopy leftovers. I think everybody has these two albums mixed up. On Swag, Bieber is a dog with a shock collar. His electric fence has been switched off, but he stays inside the yard, pleading and squinching in that unholy zone of sound between genuine R&B and a child’s pouting. (“Yukon” landed hard at the Grammys, but on Swag, it’s just some Prince pantomime.) Swag II is the vastly superior album, with Bieber finding new ways around his voice. Loose, unhurried and noncommittal, these songs don’t fall far from the bespoke indecision of Dijon and Mk.gee, but because Bieber’s voice was forged in the flames of showbiz youth, he ends up wasting them all.

Maybe you hear petulance, maybe you hear expertise. Either way, it’s the kind of singing that comes from a former child star, someone forced into someone else’s idea of life. Robbed of self-awareness, Bieber became outrageously famous and permanently suspicious of everything around him. His fame still feels disagreeable because none of us should have to endure the sound of rich people sulking. But his mood remains perpetually and rightfully pissed because he has been treated poorly. Remember that clip of James Corden at some awards show telling a teenage Justin how nice he smells? That was on live television. Imagine everything else the creeps of the American entertainment industry told him off camera before he’d turned 18.

I wish I hadn’t needed to witness a 32-year-old Justin Bieber singing about Jimmy Neutron in his underpants to remember how wrong this was. But I did, and I have, and while “Yukon” continues to run laps around my brain, I wonder if Bieber will ever be able to sing from a place of true loneliness. He sounds like he wants to. If you watched his Grammy performance closely, you noticed his eyes clamping shut after the song’s third line. He was performing in front of a mirror, but he wasn’t seeing anything at all.