Justin Bieber: are the kids alright?

It’s springtime, which means the arrival of birds, other kinds of nature and some seriously young pop entities in time for Christmas album sales. That’s if the new group of underagers who’ve divorced their parents so they can work long hours perfecting their vulnerable pouts for the cameras even get that far. Teen pop is like all pop: not everyone has what it takes to make it. Except they’re teenagers so their failures usually mean lifetimes spent going in and out of rehab between attempts to cling to whatever fickle fans they made during their time in the spotlight with self-recorded acoustic songs sold through self-run websites.

One such teen who’s just appeared in the US is 15-year-old singer Justin Bieber, a Canadian kid who was signed to Usher’s Island/Def Jam offshoot label RBMG at 13 after a ‘bidding war’ between Usher and Justin Timberlake’s Tennman Records. The label interest is being publicised as coming about after Bieber started his own YouTube channel of covers of songs by the likes of Usher and Timberlake, although there is a short bridging sentence being used to get to the actual signing part of the story – something about Bieber’s family hiring a manager who shopped him around. But it’s all about the organic growth of a real audience and the introduction of a real talent.

Bieber’s first single, One Time, not surprisingly featuring Usher in the clip, instantly evokes a “let’s watch this car veer into oblivion” reaction due to his vocal – apparently the impressive part of his talent that got everyone onside originally – being wrung through AutoTune beyond recognition. What’s left is a dorky-looking white kid wearing a baseball cap making earnest ‘yearning’ faces and hanging with his homie at Usher’s pad. Swoon.

It reminds me of a few interviews I’ve been sent to in past years, most when record labels had enough money to fly out new acts to do some pre-release promo and play radio showcases in the hope they’d pick up some business here. They’d come, they’d go, we’d never hear from them again.

I met a 17-year-old Californian named Katy Rose (well, named Kathryn Bullard, but that was never gonna fly) one afternoon in an upstairs label office. Rose was the daughter of a keyboardist who’d toured with the Grateful Dead who seemed to have been given a pop career for her Sweet 16th. She had the attitude part down, despite not yet having a hit anywhere, and lorded over the label reps in the room, perhaps thinking that commanding all the attention with loud self-importance was the marker of a real ‘star’, perhaps just doing what she did best. She was post-Avril, a ‘confessional’ waif-like dirty blonde with songs on the Thirteen and Mean Girls soundtracks. (The latter track, Overdrive, was by no means bad and featured a great line about “sitting in Jane Mansfield’s car”.) A year later, her major US label dropped her.

Rose’s current website features a bio that reads like a list of failures. A promised and undelivered album here, a short-lived connection to an independent label there. She ends a diary entry dated July 2009: “I cannot wait to get you guys my new music!!! You’re gonna love it! like I love you…”

Another young guy I met with in a restaurant some years back I can’t even remember the name of – Ryan? Rohan? Running With Publicists? He was in Australia to play support for another singer/songwriter type person, possibly Missy Higgins, and seemed to be quickly following on from Jesse McCartney as a beachy dude who played soft pop rock on an acoustic. Which obviously worked until his label realised Jesse McCartney wasn’t viable as a big mainstream artist beyond that Beautiful Soul song. I don’t know if I should feel bad that I can’t even put his name down as an almost-was – I remember he gave stock answers to stock questions, I had a Coke and the valet was real nice about parking my rusted Toyota Corona.

There are heaps of others. Leslie Carter, sister of Aaron and Nick, never even had her album released following a big campaign in the States for her Like Wow! single in 2000. Justin Timberlake’s first signing, Dutch teen Esmee Denters, has so far been a no-show is the US despite a few attempts to prime audiences for her arrival. And even with success, there’s no guarantee of not setting screwed over by the label once the cracks start showing – once teen ‘sensation’ JoJo has filed a lawsuit against Da Family Entertainment for holding her third album back and not letting her out of her contract.

It could’ve been worse for JoJo, though. Katy Rose, too. Either of them could’ve been in Interscope Records’ new and youngest ever international act, Clique Girlz.

From September 2009.