Justin Bieber Might Just Make It And 5 Other Things We Learned In That Case Study

Justin Bieber, enigma and tabloid fixture, hasn’t given a solo interview in almost two years. Currently engulfed in the fight of his life — battling lawsuits, a press standoff and his own incident-prone behavior — he has yet to open up lucidly from the inside of that tornado, and may not be able to. Into that vacuum, a New York magazine case study from award winning writer Vanessa Grigoriadis excavates her 2011 interview with a then effervescent kid Bieber and arcs it to the monstered figure of today.

There’s plenty in her 5,200-word article, and its strength is that it doesn’t try to shoehorn glib answers to a familiar story of a child star dream cum nightmare bender. Instead, Grigoriadis attempts to understand the pressures Justin Bieber may feel and accumulated neuroses he seems to be exhibiting. Big on reason and small on the kind of reductive press he’s received for over 15 months, we pull six of her standout insights, adding a few for your consideration.

1: Precocious Beginnings

“As I sat there with the little Bieber, the question of what he would become loomed large in my mind. Would he be a teen-pop casualty like Aaron Carter, or was he a value stock headed for superstardom? At the time, I would have put coin on No. 2. I didn’t think that Bieber would fly close to his idol, Michael Jackson… but imagined him as a pale version of Justin Timberlake, a peach-fuzzed post-R&B white boy who set out upon the world to de-nastify Bobby Brown for the Ohio crowd at a time when major male pop stars could be counted on one hand. There was a future in that.”

So recalls Grigoriadis of her interview with Bieber for Rolling Stone in 2011. Back then, with his star still bright and ascending, he babbled excitedly about Rubik’s Cube, liking “brunette girls. But I also like blonde girls. I like all girls!,” a Will Ferrell obsession, while his mom Pattie Mallette raptured about her only child’s ability to “carry on a conversation” aged one and two and his mastery of Hacky Sack.

Grigoriadis sets Bieber’s potential against the real and emotional poverty of his parental start, the facts of which are so well known they have become tropes. Pattie — whose horror movie childhood of sexual abuse, delinquency and a suicide attempt, and his dad, Jeremy, who left when Justin was only 10-months-old and seemingly returned just in time for the “multicolored Ferraris” — were too young and dabbled with addiction. They couldn’t prepare their boy for the peculiar, gilded brutality of showbusiness, unlike contemporaries Taylor Swift’s parents.

And it shows.

2: Manager Scooter Braun: Well-Intentioned Adoptive Father Figure Or Seller Of A Corruptive Dream

“Once, after an Orlando show, he started crying. ‘Justin sat down and told me he didn’t like being famous,’ Braun said. He told Bieber, ‘We can do the teenage-pop-star thing with no long-term career plan, and we can ride this thing for a few years, and your career will be done—and I mean over—or we can stick to our current plan, which is following in the creative footsteps of Michael Jackson. But if you want the Michael Jackson career,’ Braun continued, ‘you have to grasp that you’re never going to be normal again.'”

We heard that quote in Claire Hoffman’s Rolling Stone “Bad Boy” February cover story, but didn’t get Bieber’s answer. In Grigoriadis’ piece, we do.

“I can’t have normalcy in my life, but I don’t have to get crazy about it,” was Justin’s reply to the man who discovered him at 12 and created a life for him that he is now overwhelmed by.

Once upon a time, a kid in Braun’s care wanted out of the game but was convinced to stay, and was clear about the need to cultivate and maintain balance in his life. What isn’t evident is whether Braun’s team meaningfully tried to ensure Bieber was given the educational and psychological grounding to pull that off.

While it’s clear from the many interviews Braun has given over the years (Grigoriadis notes him as “self-mythologizing”) that he cares about Bieber, the wisdom of molding the template and thinking of his then only second protégé’s career (rapper Asher Roth was his first) on Jackson is deeply questionable. Not least, because Jackson himself spoke often about how unhappy and isolated his intense fame made him.

Looking at Bieber’s constant drawing of parallels (his split-shot Instagram of himself leaving a Miami correctional center waving atop a SUV and Jackson’s similar exit from court after his 2004 arraignment on child sex abuse charges, as example), suggests he has internalized an idea of himself sharing what the author calls “mutual victimhood” with the King of Pop.

[Note: Jackson was later found not guilty of all charges.]

It’s not healthy that Braun’s team encouraged Bieber to consciously follow the footsteps of Jackson’s strange and tragic life, no matter how talented his art. If his team had to use MJ – given that Bieber hero-worshipped him without their prompting – they would have been better off emulating Jackson’s study of and focus on his music, rather than the exhaustive Truman Show-like filming of Justin’s life.

That constant access seemingly developed Bieber’s extreme aversion to being photographed and his — alleged — Caligula-like directives to his bodyguards to elude snappers. It also led to the public’s backlash against Bieber’s ubiquitousness. He was getting booed at basketball games and arenas long before his scalding at the 2013 Billboard Music Awards.

Time and time again Braun has made excuses for Justin’s unruliness, such as when a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation producer and one of the show’s stars publicly knocked Bieber’s on-set antics after his 2011 guest spot.

It indicates Braun and his team indulged Justin and did not give him the limits that any and every child needs — and especially one lacking a steady, father figure in formative years. The rot deepened when Bieber gained control of his money and Mallette relinquished her already loosely held reins as part of their “independence” agreement when he turned 18 — with a multi-million dollar bullet.

3: 14 I’m 14 Forever ( à la”Strawberry Fields”)

“It’s a known known among people who work with famous people that famous people are psychologically stuck at the age they became famous, and Bieber is eternally 14. There he is, allegedly chucking eggs at the house of an annoying neighbor (sic.)”

It’s been said many times before that stars freeze-frame emotionally at the age the tidal wave of fame impacts their life, and the younger that happens the more difficulties experienced as they age.

In real terms, in Biebs’ life this was revealed in his immature-but-much-more-common-than-we-think-racial-insensitivity in the N-word videos that he was extorted over for years, and his inability until recently to calmly deal with invasive but inevitable paparazzi attention.

As Jezebel’s Dodai Stewart wrote in her article, some therapy for Bieber to work through the cocktail of his “unstable childhood, an unhealthy amount of attention, daddy issues, anxiety problems and a couple of identity crises,” appears to be necessary and would have been so much easier to implement when he was at a more malleable age than now.

And it’s not as if his team didn’t see the red flags of Bieber developing “real intense anxiety problems.” A source told Grigoriadis that when the relationship between Justin and Scooter became strained in 2013 and he began acting out like any typical teenager, “It was a roller coaster between ‘Justin is okay, everything’s going to be fine,’ and ‘He’s not okay, and he’s not picking up the phone.'”

But, by then, Bieber was already careening through his Believe world tour. An odyssey that demonstrates an artist being put out to work when he should have been made to deal with his addiction to likely industrial strength marijuana – and the rest, and exposed in unprecedented fashion by Justin’s Universal Music Group boss Lucian Grainge in a public plea in January.

4: Pop-Culture Sadism Is Something We Are All Part Of As Observers Or Doers, That Means We Can Choose To Stop

“Bieber is an essential player, and beneficiary, of the low-culture fixation of the moment: whether child stars, those ­entitled, overpaid—yet also tragic and pitiful—figures can make it across the wobbly bridge to adulthood without falling in the choppy waters below. This is a kinky national ritual, our current form of pop-culture sadism.”

It’s happening and it’s speeding up. Most are participating in the relentless exploitation of a kid ill-equipped to deal with the spotlight of social media-enhanced fame and scrutiny, and is seemingly unaware of his own contribution to it – nearly nude selfies, a recent example. But we, the narrators, who constantly tell Bieber we are better and more educated than him, do have a choice to elevate a toxic narrative.

Maybe we don’t have to help, but we also don’t have to hinder.

In addition to the widespread name-calling and belittlement of Bieber in media coverage that celebrates similar stances from Seth Rogen, Patrick Carney, Sharon Osbourne amid others, intermittent Bieber hit pieces churned out by bottom-feeder gossip sites Radar Online, Star, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style and OK! Magazines et al, are repeated by the echo chamber and are a form of abuse of someone barely out of teenhood.

Baseless stories aside, the willingness of the gossip news cycle to prism any story involving Bieber through the harshest of interpretations – see the recent Beyonce/Jay Z mugshot item — is a choice. If we can all see the one of two endings of the Bieber movie (and we all can), choosing not to accelerate that isn’t just an act of kindness, but arguably a responsibility.

5: If Bieber Is Addicted To Beliebers, God Help Him

“More than drugs, it’s love, the halo of awe, to which Bieber may truly be addicted, the very thing that made him uncomfortable as a kid (the wailing, the garment rending, the marriage proposals), but which was also, paradoxically, a kind of nurture. ”

Bieber and Beliebers have been locked in symbiosis for his entire career, from an amateur YouTube sensation through to his 2009 world stage debut then full idolhood. He’s addicted, they’re addicted, and their social media connection is the medium and fuel that feeds it.

The bullying of on-again, off-again girlfriend Selena Gomez by a contingent of Bieber fans right from the start of their relationship to the recent Twitter protest over the couple’s reunion, shows the projections of his constituency haven’t dimmed despite the battering that Justin’s image has taken for over a year.

The Bieber Fever phenomenon was cultivated by his team to harness the buying potential of an impressionable target audience, and it’s unlikely Justin and his forever pressed fans will ever willingly untangle from their mutual need.

6: All Is Forgiven, Even More So If Bieber Delivers A Hit

“But the music business will forgive Bieber if he has just one big song on his next album, and if he doesn’t do something insane like start rapping like Vanilla Ice. And with one confessional ABC interview, and one funny late-night interview, the media will forgive him.”

Well, it would have to be a big hit. But, tethered with the other redemption moves Grigoriadis mentions, her grace note ending comes off a profoundly on point analysis and the fact that she consulted with music industry executives. There’s every reason to think it’s a grounded belief and that Bieber isn’t doomed.

If Bieber can work through his “stuff,” calm down, clean up and bring his 2015 slated album together, tackling subjects that don’t just sing of persecution, but open up honestly and move people to either dance or simply understand him better — he really could phoenix out of his extraordinary gallop through the fire.

Bottom line: Bieber had talent in the beginning and he has talent now. If Robert Downey Jr. and the late Cory Monteith can teach us anything; it’s that rooting for a fellow human being to survive a fall, is allowing anyone who has ever stumbled the chance to get back up.

To read the entire, terrific New York magazine piece click the highlight.

[Images via Instagram.]