Review: Justin Bieber hard to 'Believe' at Staples Center
Well, he didnt throw up, and what a shame that was.
With all due concern for Justin Biebers well-being, the pop stars onstage vomiting episode Saturday night in Arizona where he kicked off a seven-month world tour that hit Staples Center on Tuesday provided a valuable (and all-too-rare) peek behind the teen-pop curtain.
Was it gross? Duh.
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Yet the presumably unplanned spectacle, endlessly replayed on YouTube, reminded us in vivid detail that Bieber isnt just a global brand with a vast multimedia dominion. Hes also an 18-year-old boy whose rightfully iffy reasoning skills led to a pre-show meal of spaghetti Bolognese washed down with whole milk, as he told TMZ.
Mistakes: Theyre what kids even the famous ones do.
By Tuesdays sold-out concert, the first of two at Staples, the curtain had been dutifully redrawn. Briskly paced and intricately choreographed, this high-tech pop production (with a mixture of live and prerecorded singing) emphasized the idea of Bieber over the real-life person; it merely reinforced established baseline notions: Cute face! Great hair! Nice voice!
Biebers grand entrance seemed to promise an expansion of those themes. Following an introductory v! ideo in which he appeared to fly around the arena, the singer descended from above the stage attached to a pair of enormous steampunk-style wings. Then he and his eight-piece band launched into All Around the World, the throbbing opener from this years excellent Believe, while a crew of dancers raced through the crowd hoisting flags from various countries, including Biebers native Canada.
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The moment was weirdly exciting and excitingly weird, like the product of a teenagers comic-book imagination. He kept it up during the lovely Catching Feelings, which at Staples became the basis for a bizarre outer-space mermaid situation.
From there, though, Tuesdays 90-minute show quickly flattened out, papering over Biebers idiosyncrasies with hand-me-down set pieces such as the 1990s-era drill-team routine in One Time and the Motown-inspired shuffling that accompanied Die in Your Arms.
Guest appearances by Jaden Smith and Carly Rae Jepsen (the latter of whom opened the concert) provided brief upticks in energy; they allowed Bieber the opportunity to interact with another human in real time. But neither left behind a lasting effect.
What made Biebers cipher-like presence especially disappointing is how effectively he communicates via other channels: his songs, of course, but also his Twitter feed and his YouTube clips and the photographs taken by the kind of paparazzi he battled Tuesday in a video during She Dont Like the Lights.
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In these and other venues Bieber projects a specifically lifelike persona! : When Li! zzie Widdicombe reported in the New Yorker recently that Bieber displayed some poor sportsmanship in a game of greenroom crotch-jab, the reader mightve thought, Yeah, I can totally see that.
Hes fully a 21st century creation perhaps the pop idol most attuned to the age of social media but onstage Bieber revealed only incidental glimpses of the kid within, as when he adjusted his skin-tight trousers following an acrobatic move or flashed an I-cant-help-it grin at the sound of fans cheering his exposed abdomen. Last weekends vomiting incident served a similar function however unpleasantly at his Arizona show.
Bieber brought up his gastrointestinal troubles at Staples after a ho-hum acoustic medley he delivered atop a giant crane. He was telling the audience how he doesnt like doing interviews or photo shoots that what he really cares about is performing for his fans.
Im not up here sick, he said. Im good!
Then he did Beauty and a Beat, a highlight from Believe about losing oneself in the music; Bieber actualized the concept by sitting down behind a drum set and bashing out a hectic solo. At the end of the song he kicked over the drums, explaining with a spray of little-boy petulance, Sometimes I just want to be a rock star.
Sometimes, maybe but here, at least, not often enough.
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