Listen To Florence & The Machine Cover Justin Bieber [Video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEak-k2rrpM

Florence & The Machine are the third major indie group to cover Justin Bieber in the past few weeks. Florence joins Chvrches (with their cover of Bieber’s “What Do You Mean”) and Pentatonix (who covered the same song as Florence & The Machine). To check out Florence & The Machine singing “Where Are Ü Now,” Bieber’s collaboration with Skrillex & Diplo, watch the video above. We’re including the other indie-covers of Bieber songs below, for your listening pleasure.

Florence Welch slows the song down, deploying her sultry, throaty contralto to reach deep and access the emotional ambiguity of Bieber’s hot summer night club-banger.

Her version of the Bieber hit appeared on the BBC show Live Lounge yesterday. You can listen to the entire Florence & The Machine set by clicking through to the Live Lounge episode here. Florence also played plenty of material from their new album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful — “Ship to Wreck,” “Sweet Nothing,” “What Kind of Man,” “Queen of Peace,” and “Delilah.” If you haven’t heard the studio version of Florence’s new album check it out near the bottom of this article.

Other artists who have appeared on Live Lounge recently include chart-toppers The Weeknd, FKA Twigs, and — as mentioned — Scottish pop heroes Chvrches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_e-wnWUVM4

The Chvrches cover is somewhat lighter than Florence’s gloss, but possibly comes across as a snappier Bieber cover. Chvrches’ new LP Every Open Eye just dropped this Monday, according to the A.V. Club — it’s likely to be their breakthrough album.

Pentatonix’s cover is a resonantly depressive take on the same song that Ms. Welch & her Machine covered in their BBC session. The Pentatonix cover is a tortured slow burner with a soulful edge — a sound somewhat in the tradition of Active Child.

Which leaves a final question: What’s up with Justin Bieber’s sudden street-cred with pop-laced Indie-soul-singer acts? Justin Bieber’s meteoric rise roughly in tandem with the YouTube generation put him on the A-List of celebrities from the generation that’s given us Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Taylor Swift.

Justin Bieber’s gradual metamorphosis is a kind of riff on one of the major ritualistic themes that characterized ‘noughties‘ pop-culture: the deflowering of the Mousketeers. Somewhat in the manner of Aztec human sacrifices being dismembered atop of the Great Pyramid of Technotitlán, one after the other, in relatively rapid succession Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez passed through a series eldritch rites that transformed them from pedagogical tools deployed to teach tweens about white-bread American values into avatars of sexuality as the demographic cohort corresponding to their moment came into the full-flower of puberty and eventually went away to college.

Justin Bieber–one year Miley Cyrus’s junior–belongs to this generation, and yet to some extent stands apart from it. The Bieber was not groomed to be a celebrity by a mega-corporation starting in early childhood. He was merely groomed to be a celebrity by a mega-corporation starting in his tween years. There’s a big difference. To an extent Bieber’s ascent to celebrity is more closely kindred to Michael Jackson’s than it is to Miley Cyrus’s. However, considering the macabre consequences of the former child star’s surreal celebrity the distinction is hardly enviable. Michael Jackson was 24 when he put out Thriller, the best-selling album of all time. So the Bieb’s–at 21 years of age–has another three years at least before we can start to gauge the full extent of his legacy.

Until now, the Biebs has seemed to have more in common with mentors like Usher and Britney Spears, as well as his A-List contemporaries. Is the new traction he seems to have with the Indie crowd a function of his changing sound, or is it a sign of a more promiscuously pop & open-minded Indie culture? Time will tell.

If Justin Bieber is like Michael Jackson, Florence Welch would be like–who? Kate Bush? Florence & The Machine are a way better band than Kate Bush, though. I think lord is Kate Bush, Florence is like…well I’m not sure. At any rate, here’s the studio version of Florence & The Machine’s new album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful.

Here’s Chvrches new album, Every Open Eye.

[The Featured Image of Florence & The Machine for this article is courtesy of Cassandra Hannagan/ Getty Images.]