We regret to inform you that Justin Bieber has teamed up with two husbands named Dan and Shay to produce a banger that Wife Guys everywhere will surely blast from their car windows for all of cuffing season. Titled “10,000 Hours,” it is chock full of wives and is almost certainly already playing in a horror loop at your local supermarket. You can check it out here, but be warned: Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it. It seems to have been genetically engineered in a lab to haunt your eardrums.
The video features pop-country duo Dan + Shay, Bieber, and all of their wives. Here is Hannah Billingsley, smiling coyly at her Shay from the end of a couch; here is Abby Law, humoring her Dan as he strums her a melody; here is Hailey Baldwin, fresh from her second wedding to Bieber, canoodling her beloved on a flower mattress. And here are the husbands, promising to love their wives, either for the next 10,000 hours — i.e., 416 and 2/3 days, i.e., the amount of time Malcolm Gladwell says it takes to master anything — or the rest of their lives.
So, what is happening here? Is “10,000 Hours” country music? I … don’t know. Is it a love song? Well, yes, but a seemingly impersonal one — for example, a Google search suggests Hailey Bieber did not get her middle name from her grandma as her husband seems to think she did, although maybe that lyric was meant for one of the other wives. Is it an anthem for Wife Guys, by Wife Guys? Unequivocally, yes.
The Wife Guy loves his wife loudly, performatively, and for apparently self-promotional purposes. As Intelligencer’s Madison Malone Kircher put it, Wife Guys “make themselves famous for things their wives did, or qualities their wives have or had.” In “10,000 Hours,” we listen to a bunch of dudes ask their wives personal questions — “What’s your favorite song? / Does it make you smile? / Do you think of me? … When you think about your forever now / Do you think of me?” — that said dudes then make about themselves. I’m not saying these guys don’t love their wives, but: A bunch of men mining their partners’ interior lives for information they can then leverage into a Top 40 hit? Profiting off their wives’ personalities for their own gain? Now That’s What I Call Wife Guys! Vol. 1. (Also featuring “Chubby Sexy” by Curvy Wife Guy.)