As Long as You Love Him

Hattie Lindert listens to Justin Bieber’s “SWAG.”

By Hattie LindertAugust 1, 2025

• Music

I REMEMBER THE POSTER because we all had a version of it. He’s wearing a zip-up hoodie under a leather vest, eyes wet and stormy beneath a swoop of chestnut bangs just coiffed enough to look careless. The sweatshirt might be gray, or black, or violet. Sometimes his hands are thrown back like Superman; sometimes they’re tucked in his pockets like a sidling middle schooler. But at the turn of the 2010s, Justin Bieber was there—everywhere, inevitable—watching over the beds, desks, and lockers of millions of tweenagers and their collective buying power. “It’s like he’s singing just to me,” a young fan gushed to Vanity Fair in 2011 as she waited with 20,000 others like her outside Bieber’s sold-out Madison Square Garden show. He was everyone’s, and that meant he could be yours.

Pop ubiquity looks quite different today from how it did 15 years ago. Monoculture is a fleeting memory—the Ellen appearances and 3D concert films that once signified the big time have been replaced with loose factions of podcasters and a panoply of TikTok dances. Making it and making the best of it now look much the same. Few post-2020 works illustrate this better than Bieber’s new album, SWAG. His first full-length release since 2021’s Justice is keen to reintroduce the chameleonic star in terms and timbres that today’s snippet-happy fans can digest: short, sweet, sticky. In the broadest sense, this approach is no different from his dalliances with EDM in 2012 or reggaeton in 2017, bro country in 2020 or Afrobeats in 2021. But SWAG’s resulting amalgam is a rich indictment of a moment in pop when fandom has never been more parochial, chart metrics more inscrutable, the mainstream more parasitic to the underground. Bieber, by most measures the most famous male performer of his generation, is contending with the full weight of their growing pains. The result is a pristinely crafted identity crisis delivered by a singer whose artistic prime seems to be coinciding with the nadir of his cultural cachet.

The hole Bieber has bored through popular culture over the past decade has made it easy to lose sight of just how big he got. He broke Justin Timberlake’s chart records, then Elvis Presley’s, then Michael Jackson’s. He won Teen Choice Awards, BET Awards, CMA Awards, even Grammys. He conquered daytime television and YouTube and streaming, Twitter and Tumblr and TikTok. He was the most googled person on the planet, four years running. He sold look-alike dolls and concert films and memoirs and nail polish and hoodies and Yeezy-cribbing slides. In 2022, he sold his entire catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Capital for a reported $200 million. By that point, hundreds of millions of dollars seemed an unimpressive figure to the Bieber camp—TMZ asserted that he only made the move because he was broke, or on drugs, or both. “You’re not getting it,” he griped at a paparazzo earlier this year. “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business.” Tellingly, the hackneyed AAVE turned into a pillar of SWAG’s promotional materials—a potential blunder refracted through a prism of veteran popularity reserved for boy wonders, no matter how big they get.

Despite what many critics might venture, the least surprising thing about SWAG is just how good it sounds. Bieber developed the sound with a small army of producers and songwriters including alternative R & B luminary Dijon; Tobias Jesso Jr., who has churned out hits for two One Direction alums, HAIM, and Adele; and Mk.gee, a dexterous and daring guitarist whose gurgling style has cemented him in a new class of male stars, including MJ Lenderman, Cameron Winter, and Nourished by Time, who are making successful solo careers in the blurred margins of indie-pop and rock. But they have another thing in common: they grew up amid Bieber Fever, which has left in its wake a faded omnipotence Mk.gee touched on in a New York Times interview earlier this year. “Anything that comes out of [Bieber’s] mouth: That’s pop music,” he said. “You can really do pretty wild stuff behind that, just because it represents something.”

What Mk.gee and company do with SWAG isn’t quite “wild,” but it is experimental by definition—if that definition is Let’s get Justin on a sexy drill beat (“Swag”). No, let’s pitch his voice up so he sounds like GIVĒON was shrunken Mike Teavee–style (“Yukon”). No, let’s have Lil B MC one where the only lyric is a mondegreen (“Dadz Love”). Wait, what’s Sexyy Red up to? (“Sweet Spot”). It would sound like they were throwing shit at the wall if it weren’t for what Mk.gee so astutely observed: Bieber’s clean, flexible tenor makes anything he touches sound at once intimate and blockbuster. “Glory Voice Memo,” a bluesy homily that might as well have been recorded through someone’s pocket, is still blue-eyed soul enough to chart somewhere, or at least spawn a cover that does. The infectious rockabilly chug of “Daisies,” “Walking Away,” and “Yukon” draws on muddy guitars often reserved for that cumbersome post-Nashville sphere of “Americana,” but this is Justin Bieber we’re talking about—it won’t hinder their hero’s welcome in the great American pop songbook. The heartfelt Dijon duet “Devotion” especially feels destined to join the first-wedding-dance ranks alongside tracks like Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey” and Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud.”

One thing you might notice about SWAG’s “experiments” is that they mostly involve Black artists, primarily rappers. (The record’s final song is a sort-of exception, a sermon credited to the gospel legend Marvin Winans—it’s already Winans’s most streamed song on Spotify.) Although the prevailing tone of SWAG is somewhere between Bon Iver–esque white soul and chill-pilled new jack swing, the rollout came straight from the megahit rap album playbook: errant studio snippets, last-minute billboards, some supremely shitty guest verses. Like Timberlake before him, Bieber has sought credibility by aligning himself with rappers, understanding that the tools and textures of hip-hop dominate pop culture whether or not they’re platformed as such.

Bieber’s conflicted relationship to Black culture is most apparent on a trio of interlude skits from the comedian Druski, once a key member of Drake’s cadre. “Your skin white, but your soul Black, Justin,” he assures the singer on “Soulful.” “I promise you that.” (Bieber responds in a shy mumble: “Thank you.”) They’re the latest in a long and increasingly crude attempt to pay homage to the Black culture and vernacular that fueled his stardom, from the offhanded “Only you, shawty” on 2009’s “One Less Lonely Girl” all the way through 2021’s “MLK Interlude,” which is as uncomfortable as it sounds. Even his affiliation with “swag” in general has roots in defense. “I’m very influenced by black culture, but I don’t think of it as black or white,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2013. “It’s a lifestyle—like a suaveness or a swag, per se.” It’s worth noting that his designated prepuberty, pre–pop star “swagger coach” was a white dude, Ryan Good.

Whether he’s rummaging through Cash Cobain’s hard drives or For Emma, Forever Ago demos, the influence tattooed most boldly across SWAG is one of Bieber’s oldest: Michael Jackson. The clipped, muscular alto Bieber conjures on heady opener “All I Can Take” is a near-perfect imitation of MJ’s post–Jackson 5 sound, which Jackson honed with heavyweights including Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder to establish himself as a solo force unconfined to the ABCs of his preteen career. One can imagine how this burst chrysalis speaks to an artist whose voice cracked and contorted into adulthood in front of millions—becoming something new is a lot easier with a blueprint.

The admiration between Bieber and Jackson has never been mutual—the latter died the same year the former released his debut EP, and in 2010, a leaked collaboration between the two spurred multiple lawsuits from Jackson’s estate. But the flattery is undoubtedly sincere. Bieber grew up ferociously faithful to R & B, raised on Boyz II Men and mentored by Usher. In 2020, when his record Changes was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys, he expressed discontent at his exclusion from the R & B category. Bieber ultimately deferred to the Recording Academy (“My gratitude for feeling respected for my work remains and I am honored to be nominated either way,” he concluded the hedge-heavy rant), but his skepticism toward the confines of pop success has endured, and not just in the ill-advised Druski skits.

Bieber’s desire to shed pop for R & B is a curious reversal of a classic conundrum, also rooted in race. Bieber is white, and exceedingly defensive of his membership to a tradition he has long worshipped from just outside the door, despite easy acceptance in the more lucrative category of pop. Jackson was Black and emerged from Motown, a recording dynasty built around Berry Gordy’s ambition to put R & B into the pop pantheon. Referencing Jackson, Bieber told V Magazine in 2011: “I want to be someone who is respected by everybody.” Comparatively, Jackson wrote in his 1988 memoir Moonwalk: “Ever since I was a little boy, I had dreamed of creating the biggest-selling record of all time.”

Although what “pop music” actually is seems less clear every day, US pop charts have long laid plain what it isn’t, an identity crisis in and of itself. Despite sharing songwriters, producers, structures, and even slang, R & B and pop remain relegated to separate radio formats—and once an R & B hit “crosses over,” it’s difficult to go back. When Timbaland’s era-defining production work with Aaliyah and Missy Elliott made him a star in his own right, he maneuvered across the aisle to make hits for Katy Perry, OneRepublic, and Timberlake; on the flip, proud R & B polymaths like Ester Dean and Victoria Monét wrote dozens of hits for other pop artists before charting any of their own. White artists who crib the tones and textures of R & B turn into pop stars; R & B artists who establish the styles that harden into the bedrock of pop stay R & B artists. Jackson’s plainly stated goal to make a huge hit album was not an act of bold-faced careerism but a dream that Black music could break through to the big time without a white mouthpiece.

Still, “going pop” remains a fraught concept in R & B, a genre long rife with appropriators and interlopers disinterested in giving credit where it’s due. Bieber’s vocal reverence for crossover divining rods like Jackson and Usher bends this mold but doesn’t exactly break it. Would he take such offense at exclusion from the Grammys’ R & B category if he hadn’t already crossed over, transforming YouTube covers of Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys, and Ne-Yo into a multimillion-dollar pop career? Would he be looking for a way back into R & B if he weren’t guilty about transcending it in the first place? Would he yearn so to buck high expectations if they hadn’t been bestowed upon him in the first place?

If Bieber is the last Dougie-ing vestige of American pure pop’s glory days, it means that pop remains uniquely splintered across genre, across audience, across time. In turn, pop stardom can be as fracturing for its conduits as it is uniting for its fans. In the early years of his career, there was the “One Less Lonely Girl” challenge: a lucky audience member, usually in tears, would be chosen to join Bieber on stage for a personal serenade, complete with flowers and a throne. She would leave with a bouquet and butterfly-inducing bragging rights; he would overnight to the next stadium, where he’d deliver on the same promises. (He serenaded his wife, Hailey Baldwin, with the song at their 2019 wedding.)

Is it any surprise that Bieber, much like the social networks he launched with, did not prove to be an endless resource, nor endlessly resourceful? By treading lightly and unevenly across countless modern and age-old trends, by saying very little into a proverbial megaphone, by singing like a damn lark, Bieber is just doing what a pop supernova does best. SWAG is one big sheet of plexiglass, dripping with the Black, queer, and working-class sounds that fuel pop without ever really absorbing them. To please the masses is, inherently, a matter of dilution and distribution.

But if Bieber truly operated as a greater sum of his parts, stopped jostling for hip-hop cred or sampling Martin Luther King Jr., how would there be enough to go around for that brass ring “everyone”? As a former Belieber elucidated to MTV News in 2022, part of what drove her to doggedly promote him and profess his brilliance was that she felt the greatest version of Bieber belonged to her, and her alone. No one, not even the 11,000 followers her Tumblr stan account commanded at its biggest, saw exactly what she did. So it became her job to translate that magic, even if the main obstacle was often the very object of her affections.

Bieber’s own relationship to the Black music that shaped him reflects more than just fealty. He heard in these artists something that felt personal enough to make him want to sing, and want to share it. But the limits to his love are the very machinations that catapulted him to stardom, an Usher protégé vying with Hannah Montana for album sales. So eager to reflect the music he worshipped so zealously on a larger stage, Bieber ended up remaking pop in his own image. Changing his image, SWAG reflects, really was just a matter of standing tall on business. Changing the business itself is a different story.