There are two weird things about Justin Bieber hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time with his great new single, "What Do You Mean?"
1.) One of the biggest artists in the world has never had a No. 1 hit before.
2.) At age 21, he's the youngest male artist to ever reach No. 1.
That second point is more interesting when you consider that despite his age, he's arguably in the third stage of his career. Bieber is an old 21-year-old. He's been around long enough to blow up, outgrow the thing that made him a teen sensation, go through a maturation-through-outrageous-behavior period, and come out the other side with a renewed focus.
Bieber has appeared on three songs in 2015 — his own "What Do You Mean?", Diplo and Skrillex's "Where Are Ü Now?", and Travis Scott and Young Thug's "Maria I'm Drunk."
They're all really good, they all foreground Bieber whether it's his song or not, and they all appeal to what should be vastly different audiences. "What Do You Mean?" is a tropical house-influenced pop/R&B song that bridges Bieber's old stuff to what pop radio sounded like in August 2015. "Where Are Ü Now?" is a big, expensive lab creation from two of electronic music's most famous producers. And "Maria I'm Drunk" is a boozy posse cut from two of the strangest people in hip hop.
Bieber is throwing himself into different genres like never before, he's making good choices with who he collaborates with, and he's making fans out of people who weren't taking him seriously 24 months ago as a result.
Take "Maria I'm Drunk" as an example. The reason that song works is that Bieber isn't treated as a novelty at all. His verse fits, both musically and within the structure of the song. He's taking his job as guest singer/rapper on a big hip hop track seriously. The way he modulates his voice and even dips into that Thug-esque flow shows that he's familiar the conventions of the genre and knows exactly what he's doing here.
Joe Price wrote about this phenomenon for the hip hop and indie music website Pigeons and Planes. In his essay, "I'm Finally Ready To Accept The Reinvention Of Justin Bieber," he talks about the Bieber renaissance:
"He’s taking risks, shedding the persona of a 12-year-old girl’s dreamboat, and making music for an audience old enough to legally drink. If you were to tell me that the Biebz would hop on a track with Young Thug and Travi$ Scott at the beginning of the year, I wouldn’t have believed you, and I don’t think anyone else would have either."
Bieber has been getting rave reviews from the hip hop world since the track leaked in late August. We now live in a reality where Travis Scott brings out Justin Bieber at his album release party and it makes perfect sense.
He's getting a similar reaction from the electronic music community.
There's an awesome video about how Skrillex, Diplo, and Bieber made "Where Are Ü Now?" on the New York Times website. In that video, Diplo talks about how strange it was to see that crowd of grown-ups singing along word-for-word with Bieber for the first time.
"You've never seen adult fans screaming for him," he said. "A lot of times it's the 16-year olds, like little kids, but adults kind of disregard him."
It's becoming increasingly impossible to disregard Bieber if you care about popular music. Not only is he making the best, most inventive music of his career, he's reaching more people (and, importantly, more different types of people) than he ever has. "What Do You Mean?" — Bieber's biggest song ever by Billboard chart position — is the biggest song in the country and "Where Are Ü Now?" became one of the surprise hits of the summer, peaking at No. 8.
His upcoming album, scheduled for release in November, was always going to be one of the most talked about albums of the year by sheer force of the Bieber name. But if the last few months have raised the stakes. His carefully chosen collaborations have revealed a level of genre-bending that we didn't know existed in him, and the runaway success of "What Do You Mean?" suggests he can manufacture hits that reach the 18+ crowd.
