Day 148: Justin Bieber – Swag
I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Justin Bieber. I don’t care much for his music but I do feel for the guy, there was a time when he was growing up when gaggles of adult men decided that they didn’t like music that’s made for 12-year-old girls and therefore a child must die. Ditto with One Direction, I think that the fact that these guys are still making music is a genuine testament to their resilience.
Album cover courtesy of Def Jam Recordings
It’s bad enough to be bullied by your peers, but to have so many adults hate you with so much vitriol at your most formative age has to do something atrocious to your psyche. And it was always the same thing: they’re sissies, they’re girls, they’re gay. I’m assuming that largely it was driven by the men being uncomfortable with these kids singing about love and their feelings, but because they didn’t have the skills to vocalise it, it was easier to just go on Facebook and call Justin Bieber gay.
Ahead of the Grammy’s this Sunday, I thought I’d listen to some of the albums that are nominated for AOTY, and to my surprise, Bieber’s Swag was nominated. I don’t know what I expected but definitely not that – all I heard about it was that it was at the very least a little bit shit, and that there was a part where one of his collaborators announced that Bieber may be white but he sounds black on the album.
First of all, it’s either incredibly regressed or a power move to name your album Swag in 2025, but coming from a man who once had a verse where he said he’d “Swag, swag, swag on you” and ended it with counting down “three, two, swag”, dare I say it’s not too surprising. What’s more of a surprise is that the record ends up being a perfectly decent pop/R&B output, it’s beautifully produced and he pulls off the more mature lo-fi R&B sound very well. Sorry Biebs, but surely I couldn’t be the only one who didn’t see this coming.
I just think he should have left a fair few things on the cutting room floor. He should’ve gotten rid of some of the lower-quality songs on the record to make it tighter – 21 songs is a little bit much for my taste when he could’ve just kept the ones that are genuinely top-tier Bieber. And then there’s the little skits with comic Druski, with the aforementioned “Your skin white but your soul black, Justin,” or where they’re jokingly addressing his Standing on Business-kerfuffle, or when he’s explaining away his semi-recent social media posts. Maybe that’s his way of getting his point across, but the album would have been better without it.
It’s a better album than I expected, I’ll give him that, I just think had he not gotten carried away, this could have been genuinely top-tier. I mourn the lost potential. 7.5/10.