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It's a little unsettling to look Justin Bieber in the eyes. If you're familiar with the idea of "the uncanny valley," it's sort of like that. He appears lifelike enough, but there's something that's just…off. Like a hologram turned flesh, or if N*Sync actually were the puppets from the "Bye Bye Bye" video.
It was possible to catch glimpses of this phenomena at Moda Center last night, even from the cheap seats, whenever his face popped up on the JumboTron, etched with a strange remove from the big-time arena-pop show happening around him. It was only the third date of his massive Purpose World Tour, so he couldn't have been over it already. It didn't scan as concentration, though his choreography did come off stiff and tentative compared to the dancers doing laser-parkour behind him. He did say he hadn't slept the night before, in one of his few, awkward attempts at unrehearsed banter, but the dude's been performing since he was a kid—he should be able to fake his way through a hangover. The only way to describe it, really, is that he looked dead inside. Or at least vacant.
But then, that's kind of always been the thing with Bieber. As pop stars go, he's emptier than most—a blank space on which every fan can write their name. That was supposed to change with Purpose, the album meant to reposition him from "teen idol turned bad boy" to "serious adult." The music is more sophisticated, but the songs remain emotionally vague, full of Hallmark platitudes like "Love Yourself" and "Life Is Worth Living" and "What about the children?" It's got three killer singles that sound unlike anything on the radio right now, but the feeling is as if the producers—huge names like Diplo and Skrillex— are working through him, not with him. It's telling that the most distinctive element of those songs is the manipulation of voice into a kind of synthesized ocarina. He's the canvas more than the artist.
That's the effect of seeing him live, too: He's the excuse for the show, rather than the show itself. As a spectacle, it was big and loud, nonstop and nonsensical. Bieber entered dangling in a glass cube on loan from David Blaine, and spent 90 minutes being hoisted onto various platforms and sucked down pneumatic tubes. Motifs were designated seemingly at random: the Renaissance for "Where Are U Now"; electro-Tron for "Boyfriend"; skate-punk for "What Do You Mean," complete with onstage ollies. He backflipped on a giant trampoline and ripped a drum solo, because that's what you do when an extra drumset suddenly rises from the stage. He ended with "Sorry," ostensibly a blanket apology for his petulant-brat years, while splashing in a shower of water from the ceiling, which was either a symbol of purification or just an excuse for him to finally remove his shirt. All of it was accompanied by an unending chorus of joyous screeching from the crowd, and it was all distracting enough that if you didn't catch a glimpse of him on the video screen, you could convince yourself that he was reciprocating that joy.
It was the set's quieter moments, though, that underscored the sense of detachment. After "Baby"—a song that now sounds hilariously out of place next to his new tropical EDM stuff, performed while wearing a sleeveless Marilyn Manson tee with "BIGGER THAN SATAN" on the back—he laid prone for a solid minute, huffing into his headset mic, then sat up and said he wanted to "talk about some deep shit." That's when he admitted to "raging" the night before, and that he was excited about going fishing tomorrow. It sounds personal and folksy on paper, but it came off weird and unnatural—like a bleach-blonde Terminator struggling to mimic human interaction. During the requisite "intimate acoustic mini-set," performed on a purple couch, Bieber stopped midsong to razz someone in his band, and he seemed oddly proud of this moment of spontaneous interpersonal exchange, though it was hard to tell what the joke was supposed to be.
Of course, Bieber probably hasn't had much interaction with an actual human since he was 14, unless you count record executives and Usher. As my counterpart at The Oregonian has pointed out, Bieber was the first social-media superstar, and he's managed to survive beyond his natural expiration date by continuing to use those tools to deepen the relationship with his audience. But like all online relationships, the illusion begins to crumble when it goes IRL. For the screaming masses, simply being in the same room as him was enough. But for those who caught his gaze, it was hard to feel like we haven't been getting catfished this whole time.
All photos by Emily Joan Greene.
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