celebrity gossip, academic style

A few months back, someone on my Twitter feed asked “What is a Justin Bieber?” Obviously he’s a person, and more specifically, a teenage pop star, but the phrasing of the question highlights he’s particular role in the mediascape today. Justin Bieber isn’t just a teenage boy with a baby face. He’s not just the next New Kid on the Block, nor is he a new Justin Timberlake. His fame is organic to the internet, and he’s either a harbinger of the future of the music industry or a model for a new type of teenage fame.

It’s tempting to just think of him as a pop idol. His songs are pure treacle; he looks like he’s still around 10. But he’s quite different from the likes of, say, Zac Efron, both in his provenance and in the way that he’s manipulated his fame since he was ‘discovered.’

The Bieber Creation story is both fitting with our current digital moment…and somewhat creepy. Bieber taught himself to sing and play multiple instruments, eventually entering some contest in his native Canada and coming in second place. His mom then started posting videos of Bieber covering various songs (like this one from Usher) to YouTube, and poof, several months and several millions hits later, he’d caught the eye of music producer, who flew Bieber to Atlanta and had him sing for Usher, who immediately took interest. (Rumor has it that there was a bidding war between Usher and Timberlake; it’s unconfirmed).

Bieber’s first album, My World, was released in November 2009, featuring the single “One Time” (featuring Usher). The video for the song (see below) has accumulated a RIDICULOUS 65 million hits. He even sparked a riot in a Long Island mall when someone yelled that he was going to appear in Abercrombie Kids.

But I don’t think Bieber really made it into the public consciousness (and by public, I mean people over the age of 17) until the release of his song “Baby” in January. The song, like the rest of the Bieber oeuvre, features benign promises of chaste love and devotion, only this one gets a special rap from an uncharacteristically clean-mouthed Ludacris.

He also got to sing the first verse of the new ‘We Are the World’ to benefit Haiti, prompting many old fogies to remark “who the hell is this kid?” He is the subject of “3 year old Crying Over Justin Bieber,” a glorious and hilarious home video with a inconsolable toddler bawling because “I just love Justin Bieber” and “I know that he loves me back” that went viral last month. Trust me, this video is incredible. Even more recently, he was the ‘recipient’ of an intimate letter from the normally pop culture-phobic Atlantic, and became the pivot of ‘Funny or Die’s’ April Fool’s Joke, in which the website was ‘overtaken’ by Bieber to become “Bieber Or Die,” featuring videos of Bieber gone power crazy, Justin Bieber “just wants to tell you he loves you girl,” and a dozen others.

So what is a Justin Bieber? He’s a transmedia product — and one who has achieved that status without the help of Disney or Nickelodeon. ’Transmedia’ is a term generally applied to storytelling techniques — defined by one transmedia storyteller as “the art of conveying messages themes or storylines to mass audiences through the artful and well planned use of multiple media platforms.” Lost is a good example of transmedia storytelling, as are Heroes, and The Matrix - all of which have had additional content published online or in alternate formats that can be consumed by fans as a means of adding to their understanding of the show and its narrative.

Now, I realize the term and idea of transmedia do not translate perfectly to a star. But I do think that we can think of a star as having a ‘narrative’ — and, as in the case of Bieber, a narrative that has components that are consumed by the majority, while other components are meant for consumption by fans aching for deeper understandings of the ‘story’ that is Bieber. Stars were transmedia before narratives were transmedia: dating back to Classic Hollywood, gossip and ‘story’ magazines lured readers with unknown details (and re-writings) of stars and the narratives in which they were featured (see Janet Staiger’s piece on Marlene Dietrich in Perverse Spectators for a particularly compelling instance). Just as today’s transmedia consumers were lured by the ‘tip of the iceburg’ that is the show/movie proper, so too are fans of stars — you see the star in a movie, on a YouTube video, whatever — and are drawn to seek our further details. To satiate your curiosity, sure, but also as a means of pleasurably expanding your understanding of the star and his/her meanings. Again, compare this activity to that of fans of Lost engaging in discussions, role-playing, fan-fic, and reading deep into the alternate and ‘fringe’ histories beneath the show on The Fuselage. In that case, it’s as if the show were the star, and the backstory provides the same pleasures that seeking personal history, dating habits, etc. function for a celebrity.

How, specifically, does Bieber occupy this position? He regularly Twitters; he has a website; his music videos are on Youtube. None of those things make him all that different from other pop stars. Yet I would argue that it’s the existence and tremendous popularity of his original videos — coupled with ‘stunts’ such as “Bieber or Die,” the Twitter account (with its 1.7 million followers), and dozens of videos Bieber made specifically for fans, including “So How Did I Fracture My Foot with Taylor Swift?” and “Justin’s Favorite Girl Response” that make his transmedia status (at least somewhat) unique. Bieber has an immense footprint on the web — and that, more than his signature haircut and plaintive voice, are what helped make him so successful.

Again, I don’t think Bieber is unique in his status as a transmedia star. Rather, I think that his success underscores the necessity of *being* transmedia — whether through Twitter, writing books, serving as a guest judge on a reality program, or having a website that does more than simply reproduce known facts about the star (as in the case of Tom Cruise’s). If you want to be a star today, whether in music or reality television, you’ve got to offer breadth — room to explore, room to be fascinated, room for your fans to feel like they know more about you than anyone else. At this point, I don’t think the paradigm applies to ‘organic’ movie stars (that is, stars whose stardom is either rooted and long-perpetuated almost exclusively by movie roles, with Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., George Clooney Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt as specimens par excellence) — but then again, I don’t think that transmedia storytelling applies nearly as much to movies as it does to this relatively recent wave of heavily serialized television. To resist that pull is, to quote John Mayer’s analysis of Jennifer Aniston’s career, pretending like you still live in 1997.

To conclude, I could go into elaborate detail about how Bieber’s lyrics and look cater to ‘tween audiences that actually want a highly asexual crush. But instead, I’ll just point you to the startlingly full collection of “Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber.”