eRsaTz:
HOT NOW!!!
brought to you by
Justin Bieber:
TWIT or TWAT?
As the pint-sized teen sensation turns twenty and is therefore no longer a teen sensation, HOT NOW!!! in conjunction with the Birmingham Institute of Learning and Facts casts an eye over the sensation’s life and career so far and tackles the question that’s keeping the internet churning right now: that Justin Bieber, is he just a twit - or is he actually a twat?
Nobody who has stayed awake for anything more than, say, thirty minutes per day over the last year or so could be unfamiliar with the comings and goings of the very-early-twenties’ sensation. In public as in private, says Professor Allan Ljund of the Birmingham Institue of Learning and Facts, “his behaviour is almost without exception that of a total cock. In fact if you took the world’s most scabrous, infected cock, one that was just hanging onto its scrotbag by grime and hope, one that in its time had been responsible for transmitting diseases to countless others, and made it aware that it was being used as the comparative benchmark for young Bieber’s carryings-on, it would rear up in rightful fury at the slight,” says Professor Ljund. “And then almost certainly fall off into the dusty ground,” he adds.
a scabrous, infected total cock, yesterday
Indeed, that the fun-sized not-quite-teenage-any-more sensation “is, by any standard, a top-drawer bell-end is a plain and measurable fact,” agrees Doctor Tobermory Litterman, Ljund’s colleague at the BILF. “If he’s not off his head drag racing with his father disguised as Miley Cyrus, or demanding bongs and sexual favour from perfectly self-respecting airline staff, or tweeting pictures of his still-more-or-less-pubescent penis to his ex-girlfriend in rehab declaring that her success has been entirely contingent upon her relationship with him, or parading about dressed only in a pair of trousers that are clearly not his, then he’s making those apalling records. The facts speak for themselves.”
clockwise from bottom left: drag racing arrest; bongs on a plane; trousers
So the only real question is: who’s to blame? Or to ask it another way, is he a twit or a twat? Doctor Litterman explains: “When you look at a major league todger like Mr Bieber, and you evaluate his conduct, before you can make any meaningful judgement you have to identify to what extent he can really help it. Genes, environment, context - these can be powerful agents informing our behaviour in ways we are not directly aware of. And then of course sometimes folk just make fully conscious decisions to act like a massive phallus.”
“The object of our current research,” continues the Doctor, “is to assess, with the evidence before us, how much the actions of Justin Bieber are the result of one thing or the other. Ultimately we want to determine whether he is in fact more of a twit - this is who he is pre-destined to be given his nature and circumstances - or a twat - somebody who could quite easily choose not to behave like this, but actively decides that he will.”
the story begins
Our trusty celeb-academics started at the beginning of the story, when the 17-year-old Pattie Mallette fell pregnant with the one-day-to-be teen sensation she would name Justin. Much has been made, especially by Ms Mallette in her tome Nowhere But Up: The Story of Justin Bieber's Mom, of the fact that she was encouraged to have an abortion, an option she
emphatically eschewed. “To start out, even at the earliest embryonic stage, as the subject of such a poor decision - essentially, to be such an error before you’re even out of the blocks - must have a negative effect on you,” considers
Dr Litterman. “Possibly even at the cellular level.”
Professor Ljund goes further: “With the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly and empirically state that Ms Mallette’s decision was the wrong one, and that if ever there was a clear-cut example of the right moment for an abortion, this was it. It’s hard to quantify exactly how much influence that would have on any gestating organism, but it must have been something. It must have.” Both our scholars, then, clearly chalk this one up on the “twit” side of the ledger.
Pattie Mallette, Mrs Justin Bieber's mum
Justin makes it emphatically clear to the media that he loves his mother
Next there is that most pervasive of environmental factors - where one grows up. You might think that being born in London and raised in Stratford ticked all the right boxes for a culturally enlightened upbringing - until you realised that this was in fact London and Stratford, Ontario, Canada.
“Now, I’m not one to jump on parochial bandwagons,” says Prof Ljund, “and goodness knows, Canada’s welfare system, especially its healthcare, is the envy of the Western world. But on the other hand, Canada, for fuck’s sake. Celine Dion comes from Canada,” he adds, visibly spitting.
Doctor Litterman agrees. “Being born in Canada is like having to carry pretty much all of the baggage of being American, but without any of the advantages.” Once again, Professor Ljund and Doctor Litterman find themselves in accord: Canada is a powerful mark for “twit”.
clockwise from bottom left: stratford, ontario, canada; ontario, canada; celine dion, canada
blame
For starting him on his inexorable path towards mega-stardom and nurturing his delusions of greatness at every step, it seems that we have erstwhile-teen sensation Justin Bieber’s mother to thank once again. “Every early sign that her son was a right winkle went unheeded,” observes Professor Ljund. “When she talks about how her son was kicked out of every class he attended at grade school, she still can’t stop herself saying he was ‘adorable’. Then of course she would not let anything deter him from ‘beliebing’ that he was a colossal talent. She allowed him to ‘teach’ himself how to play the guitar, piano and drums - and we can all see how well that turned out. Even when he failed to win a local talent contest she ploughed on regardless, talking him up, posting the videos, everything.”
Scooter Braun, whom no amount of anti-semitism on his mother’s part would deter. And here, say Professor Ljund and Doctor Litterman, is where the question of “twit or twat” becomes slightly less clear-cut.
going viral
“Just to put that into context,” adds Doctor Litterman, “he came second, true - in a talent contest in Stratford, Ontario, a glorified railway junction with about as many people in it as you get in Aldi at any one time on a Saturday. Third place went to Captain Pierre’s Spoon Ensemble - and the Captain had passed away several months earlier. So consider now the proto-Bieber, and what he has in his corner: a mother whose word he presumably trusts implicitly, who has this stone-clad ability to refuse the plain, simple truth that her son is not cut out in any way for a career in the performing arts. What chance has reality got against that? It seems so far from our findings that the evidence that Justin Bieber is above all a twit is mounting up.”
The next chapter of the story is the part of the Bieber legend that we all know, whether we care to or not: his “going viral” as a youtube phenomenon. As a result of this the fresh-faced just-about-teen not-quite-yet sensation would, incredibly, attract a bidding war among major industry players before signing with mentor and manager
yes
hair
“The thing is,” muses Doctor Litterman, “all this media attention and industry toadying would turn anybody’s head, let alone someone so susceptible due to his youthful immaturity. Every bit of nonsense espoused by his indecently pushy mother finds validation at this point. Not his fault.”
“But look at his haircut from around this time, when he first breaks through to become a proper pop star,” says Professor Ljund. “He looks a total glans. But a glans designed by Playmobil. Look carefully at the photos from this period in his career: he looks like a Playmobil glans. And he keeps this look for ages, like, years. He must have been aware of it. Even taking all the usual mitigating factors of fashion and its vicissitudes, the marketing advice he probably received and so on into account, this… haircut is something he deliberately said yes to many times. You can’t just keep blaming your situation for that. Eventually you have to stand up and say, “yep, that was on me: I was a twat.”
Then we have the question of the title of his first release: the EP My World. Says Dr Litterman, “Now, fair dues, he was just a kid and it all probably did seem like he was inhabiting this amazing world created just for him and he couldn’t wait, teen sensation that he was, to share it with his growing army of uncritical acolytes. But then he calls his next release, an LP this time, My World 2.0. Now that’s wanky.
“This is the one that sets all the twat-bells ringing, for many people,” continues Litterman. “My World, given the context, is forgivable, or at most, ‘twit’ - but My World 2.0 certainly comes across as twat.”
“Bloody right it does,” asserts Ljund. “First of all: 2.0. From a strictly scientific, empirical standpoint you’ve got to look at that and say ‘get the fuck over yourself, you ludicrous bubble of spunk.’ Then there’s this ongoing delusion that it’s all about him - it’s still My World - whereas by now you would have expected any reasonably non-twat person to have acquired a bit of perspective. When you also factor in that shrill cacophony that came off it, Baby - in which a child, literally a little boy of fifteen can repeatedly squawk ‘baby’ at some unfortunate girl with no apparent sense of irony whatsoever - then no, sorry,” concludes the Professor, “but My World 2.0 is all about twat for me.”
Picking a way through the next year or so of the Bieber story is, according to Litterman, “is like turning up after Car Twit crashed headlong into Car Twat on the autobahn: it’s nigh-on impossible to tell what belongs where. My Worlds Acoustic is obviously a bit of a giveaway, twat-wise, but other than that, the only thing you can be certain of is that there’s plenty of both to be found.”
One thing both our researchers are clear about, however, is that the next major staging post on the journey is Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, the 3D biopic/concert film - and that on the whole, the film “marks him indelibly and unequivocally as a twat,” in the words of Prof Ljund. “There was some optimism,” observes Dr Litterman, “that the correct title of the picture was actually Never Say Justin Bieber: Never, but that was a hope too far. By now the prospect that the adolescent idol could ever muster any kind of self-awareness or even the tiniest measure of self-deprecatory humour was fundamentally misplaced.”
Nor, according to our experts, did the second studio album Under The Mistletoe, released just over half a year later, do anything to decelerate the twat momentum. “Frank Sinatra can do a Christmas album,” argues Prof Ljund, “Sammy Davis Jr and Tony Bennett, sure. Paul McCartney, he was a Beatle, he can do whatever he likes. An Elvis Christmas album, why not? These are musical figures who have earned the right to say, ‘You know what, it’s Christmas, and I’m me, and what I fancy is doing is cashing in enormously on my credulous fanbase’s devotion to both - I’m going to make me a Christmas album.’ Justin Bieber, on the other hand, has not earned that right. But he went right ahead and made the album anyway. That’s twat in my book.”
an uhealthy focus on the self?
what a cock
Dr Litterman is not quite so sure: “You never know, with the corporate machine running the way it does nowadays - he might not be completely responsible for that decision.”
“But then you have to consider the album cover,” argues Ljund. “Granted, he’s lost that preposterous barnet, but look at him: he looks like a glue-sniffing special needs kid that just got caught wanking in the lights of a police helicopter. And he chose to look like that. You have to conclude that he thought he looked good. Ultimately, that’s twat, isn’t it?”
Sadly for Justin and his army of beliebers, our experts have it as going markedly down the twathills from there. “Take his own proclamations regarding his third album, Believe,” says Professor Ljund, quoting an interview Bieber gave to celebrity’s Ryan Seacrest:
I think 'Believe' is really -- my new album has really showcased what I'm capable of -- especially becoming an 18-year-old and becoming an adult. And hearing older people say, 'Wow, this new album's great. Like I didn't know that was Justin Bieber.' Or, you know, 'Wow, like I never used to listen to Justin Bieber's music, and now I like his music.' Or -- 'This, 'As Long As You Love Me,' that's Justin Bieber singing?’
the twathills (direction indicated)
“Now that in itself is crystallised twat,” asserts Ljund - who goes on to add, however, that “certainly the album does show what the little twat is capable of.” Litterman agrees: “The complete, unfailing self-absorption, the blithe incoherence, the supreme lack of self-awareness - it’s increasingly difficult to deny that these things are by now his calling cards, and they are the calling cards of a twat.”
Professor Ljund elaborates: “In the broader context of the material he’s stroking himself off about, though, it all takes on a deeper, murkier, altogether more contaminated dimension of twat. “Listen, for example, if you can possibly stand it, to Boyfriend - it’s not just that it’s the kind of bilge that could sour the milk. It’s out-and-out fucking creepy: If I was your boyfriend I’d never let you go… keep you on my arm girl, you’d never be alone… hey girl, let me talk to you. Quite apart from the fact that he sounds like he’s in serious danger of violating a restraining order, it simply doesn’t, couldn’t occur to the young Mr Bieber that a girl might want a bit of breathing space once in a while - as far as he’s concerned, once a young lady has him, she could want nothing further.”
For Professor Ljund, Boyfriend’s twattery doesn’t end there. “Then there’s the ebonics,” he says, clearly near the end of this tether. “Rhyming ‘go’ with ‘before’ is one thing, but while we eatin’ fondue? I’m-a make you shine bright? Let’s get one thing clear: this kid is from Ontario. You have to try really hard to crowbar that sort of shit into your speech if you’re from Ontario. Really hard. Do what you like, Mr Bieber, but you can’t pass this off as natural. You can only pass it off as massive twat.
“And why fondue, Justin?” continues the professor, warming to his theme. “And I’m-a make you shine bright like you’re lying in the snow? This isn’t just twat - this sounds more like the boy’s on crack. Swag swag swaggie? For fuck’s sake.”
lyrical evidence
However, Dr Litterman weighs in with an alternative view here: “Look, it’s important to remember that we can’t all be Bob Dylan. Some people just aren’t cut out to write lyrics. When you consider that Justin Bieber has provided no evidence of any other talent or even intelligence, perhaps it’s just churlish to expect him to deliver the goods vis-a-vis jotting down verse. So naturally he’s going to imitate his heroes. That’s how all raw artists make their bones. There’s an argument to be made that this comes down to twit more than twat.”
However, Dr Litterman weighs in with an alternative view here: “Look, it’s important to remember that we can’t all be Bob Dylan. Some people just aren’t cut out to write lyrics. When you consider that Justin Bieber has provided no evidence of any other talent or even intelligence, perhaps it’s just churlish to expect him to deliver the goods vis-a-vis jotting down verse. So naturally he’s going to imitate his heroes. That’s how all raw artists make their bones. There’s an argument to be made that this comes down to twit more than twat.”
“Then again, bollocks,” reconsiders Litterman, “Boyfriend is twat all the way. But anyway,” adds the Doc, “what about As Long As You Love Me? The whole traditional narrative - this is what I have to offer you - is inverted. All Justin is offering is penury. He seems to think that, being Justin Bieber, he need bring no more to the table. Now that really is twat. It’s not twit - all you need do to avoid this glaring error is think about it for a moment. Nope,” Doctor Litterman concludes, “‘as bad as Boyfriend clearly is, As Long As You Love Me is worse.”
All focus on the diminuitive pan-pubescence sensation’s musical output aside, however, our valiant researchers share the conclusion that the clearest way to establish his credentials as either those of twit or twat is to look at what we might call his social behaviour. But it is here, ironically, that our researchers seem most keenly split.
outside the studio
special report
“The repeated lateness to his own concerts,” observes Professor Ljund, “when, by definition, 95% of your audience is children under 16 who have to go to school the following day: what a helmet. But of course we shouldn’t forget,” adds the Professor, going purple by now, “by his own account he no longer wants those fans. He doesn’t want to be just another teen heart-throb, in fact, being a teen heart-throb really annoys him, apparently - his words, not mine. He’s clearly got another set of fans, a comparably huge fanbase, just waiting in the wings to replace them and keep him in Fisher-Price bling and KFC.”
clockwise from top left: Justin shows off his Fisher-Price bling; the Colonel; Justin with Selena; Justin's nemesis
Then there is the question of his on-off relationship with Selena Gomez. “He appears to be locked in a classic cycle of abuse of the poor girl,” offers Dr Litterman, “the four stages of the cycle - tension building, incident, reconciliation, then calm - are all played out very publicly over Twitter and other forms of social media and can be followed to an almost metronomic rhythm, every time. One can speculate that the pressures of his position, not to mention the questionable influence of those around him, are fuelling this to a degree.”
“Locked in a cycle my arse,” protests Ljund. “He’s a twat, is what he is.”
“Consider his recent history,” counters Litterman. “He has shot to megastardom - being arguably the biggest star of his genre in the Western world at least - not only in a harrowingly short space of time, but also during his most formative, impressionable years. He is treated more or less as a god by countless millions of young people - well, alright, pre-pubescent girls mostly, but also by the media that feeds off them all - and therefore actively encouraged to consider himself as one. And he has quite simply never been given the opportunity to develop his personality in the usual way to prepare himself for that, to protect himself from it. It’s not surprising that he’s such a pink, veiny tool.”
Litterman goes on to make a historical comparison: “The Romans clearly understood the perils of this kind of idolatry,” he says. “Victorious Roman generals would sometimes be granted a ‘triumph’ as a reward for major military achievements, during the course of which they would be paraded around the city and heralded by the whole citizenry. For the man involved it was the ultimate ‘me party’ with everyone else joining in. You were essentially king for a day. But to ensure that your head wasn’t completely turned there would be a slave - the lowest status possible - on your shoulder repeating: ‘Remember, you are not a god’ - and the general was not permitted to do anything about it.
“What’s Justin Bieber got? A coterie of leeches and nutters, including his own mother, telling him the opposite - damn right you’re a god, albiet a pocket-sized teen-up-until-really-recently sensation one - and a record-and-t-shirt-buying public that seems to be in agreement. I’m not saying there’s no twat involved - but surely a lot of this is twit.”
a Roman triumph, not yesterday
However, says Dr Litterman, there is one incident that is more difficult to explain away in a less unfavourable light: the infamous visit to the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam.
“Hmm,” says Litterman. “Yes. Oh dear. To visit such a place, arguably the most poignant and pointed symbol of mankind’s lowest moment, to have the opportunity to witness close at hand what someone like this remarkable young girl went through and perhaps to deepen one’s own understanding of what it means to be a more conscious, committed and responsible human being - to respond to that by writing ‘Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber’ is… well, let’s be honest, it’s staggering. There comes a point where you have to say that nothing in one’s nature or upbringing provides sufficient excuse for such revolting self-obssession.”
Professor Ljund has only this to say regarding the episode:”Fffffffucking fucking cock prick cunt fucking fucking TTTWWWWAAAAATTTTTT!!!!” before bleeding from the nose and smashing up all the furniture.
the Anne Frank incident
Several days after their findings were collated, our two academics deliver their final verdict together. “It all comes down to cock, twit and twat” says Litterman in a conciliatory tone.”That Justin Bieber is a cock is not in question. Our aim was to investigate whether his quite substantial degree of cock was the result of twit or twat factors. As is almost always the case with any research project,” he explains, “there is room for diverse interpretation of the data.
“Personally I am of the view that yes, Mr Bieber is a considerable twat, although there are substantial twit influences that have done much to drive it.”
“For me, however,” concludes Professor Ljund, “while I cannot argue with the fact that Bieber is the unfortunate bearer of a marked weight of twit, it would be wrong, given the enormity of all the twat, to let him off as Doctor Litterman is prepared to do.”
So, to summarise, overall, Justin Bieber: twit or twat?
“Twat,” says Litterman.
“Vast twat,” offers Ljund.
HOT NOW!!! would like to thank the two pillars of the academic community for their tireless efforts.