Back in June we introduced you to Justin Bieber, a 15-year-old Usher protégé with a squeaky voice and a mushroom haircut. At the time, we felt this marketing-gimmick-come-to-life might be a little too calculated to resonate with the desired tween set. But we were totally wrong! Bieber’s debut E.P., My World — released November 17, and chock-full of lyrics like “Whatever you want, shorty, I can give it to you†— sold 137,000 copies in its first week and is now at No. 12 on the Billboard 200. More importantly, he’s got the ladies going crazy: Last month, his bungled appearance at a Long Island mall, where 3,000 young ones were all set to shriek over his songs, supposedly led to a near-riot. But that was all stuff we could ignore. This weekend’s rave review from the New York Times’s Jon Caramanica of Bieber’s Jingle Ball ’09 appearance — which starts off with the line “Destruction, thy name is Bieber†— we, sadly, cannot.
According to Caramanica, Bieber wrecked shit at MSG on Friday, making everyone else there — including Taylor Swift, Jordin Sparks, Kris Allen, Usher (in a cameo), and John Mayer (especially John Mayer) — look old. He was “decimating the larynxes of thousands of tween girls,†and he did it all with a walking (and dancing, we assume) leg cast. So we ask: With the Jonas Brothers tragically fragmented, and no other (assumedly abstinent) youthful pop stars at the ready, is it time for the Bieber-pocalypse? Just in case, we’ll be monitoring the situation.
20-Year-Old Fogy Cedes Audience to 15-Year-Old [NYT]