The Annals of Popular Culture: B is for Bieber…
Justin Bieber, the Internet’s hatchling, has left the nest, preparing to spread his swaggy wings and be fly…
Serious artist Justin Bieber—amid the scurrilous rumors spread by a provincial gutter press, based on their narrow-minded adherence to photographs and words—recently announced his retirement from music, signaling his embarking on a new career in broader, even more obnoxious forms of art.
Of late, Bieber’s more confrontational, avant-garde explorations in being irritating have included: peeing in a mop bucket, challenging the conventional notion of mop buckets not having some kid’s piss in them; spray-painting monkey and penguin graffiti, representing the idea that celebrities are trapped just like zoo animals, and also that Justin Bieber thinks penguins are dope; and haunting a Brazilian brothel dressed as a spooky ghost, a stand-in for the lingering specter of society’s prudishness about prostitution, and the classic Freudian connection between death and banging bitches. It also included not actually retiring from music, his most antagonistic artistic statement yet…
Read on at “Justin Bieber symbolically signals his artistic rebirth by egging his neighbor’s house.”
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As we reconsider our positions on the High vs. Low debate, we might send nostalgic birthday greetings to A.A. Milne; he was born on this date in 1882. Milne spent the earliest years of his career as a playwright, screenwriter, and the author of a single mystery novel, but is remembered for the two volumes of Winnie-the-Pooh stories he wrote for (and featuring) his son, Christopher Robin. His transitional work, written immediately after the birth of his son, was a book of children’s verse, When We Were Young, famously ornamented by Punch illustrator E. H. Shepard.
