“I keep on falling…” This is something I’ve been saying for a decade now: Let Justin sing R&B. Bieber’s back. Get in. Let’s talk about it. To me, Justin Bieber was always an R&B singer that was miscast as a pop star. And for many years, he had to suffer by being the most famous performer on the planet. So this talent that’s inside of him was always kind of sidelined. If you go back and listen to “Journals,” which was this tossed off E.P. he did in the mid-2010s, you hear someone bursting at the seams, even in this very casual way. Justin wants to sing these gut-wrenching love songs. Justin has a new album out now. It’s called “Swag.” Finally, this might be the R&B album that he’s been waiting to sing, for years now. On this album, he’s working with a lot of incredibly novel people who, when it was leaked, last year or earlier this year, that he was collaborating with them, it seemed far-fetched. – Sorry? – Leaked?! Reported. Reported by me. – O.K. fair. In fan parlance, that’s a leak. You have Mk.gee on this album. You’ve got Dijon, Sexyy Red, Cash Cobain. Bieber is coming alive. Bieber is awake to all the microcurrents that are happening in pop music. And he wants a taste. Mk.gee is one of the writers and producers of this song. You hear that detuned, groaning, sexual guitar that was all over his album from last year. What do Mk.gee and Justin Bieber have in common? They both want to pull you close and tell you what they want to do. The thing that Justin does so well as a singer, that I think was undervalued when he was a real pop star, is he has this incredibly light flutter in his voice. You hear it in the chorus here. The way that it kind of goes up, and he breaks the melody ever so gently. These are the kinds of gestures that I think he really wants to be doing. You’re listening to this, and you’re hearing flickers of early Frank Ocean. You’re also hearing acoustic white-boy soul, Jason Mraz and the like. I’m also hearing artists like Tony! Toni! Toné!, who three decades ago were experimenting with all different kinds of textures. And, of course, the uncredited spirit guide on this album is Prince. Prince is someone who communicated a tremendous amount of raw sexual power with just a few gestures on the guitar. This Bieber album is called “Swag.” What do you think of when you hear “swag“? Well, me, I think of 2012, that era when Justin was just becoming a pop star, but what was happening in hip-hop were a lot of kids were breaking rules. You have Lil B, obviously, vividly talking about swag. You’ve got Tyler the Creator and Odd Future who made “swag” an ongoing refrain. I’ve got to imagine that, on some level, at that time, as Bieber was being catapulted out into the pop stratosphere, he’s probably looking with a little bit of envy at the kids who were having a much looser form of celebrity. But what I think we’re about to see is the end of Justin Bieber, pop star, and the beginning of Justin Bieber, swag auteur. I don’t know what that was.
