X-rated Bob wrote
Sebber wrote
Hold on a second though, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to dis Bieber that don't make the disser "look like a homophobic, woman-hating advocate of murdering kids": his pitching up 2 hours late for one of the London shows (10pm on a school night), his behaviour and outburst(s) in front of the press, illegally trafficking a pet monkey across international borders... add to that the fact that the whole Bieber industry is a cynical marketing ploy to extract pocket money from kids...
All big name acts have a marketing team that seeks to separate somebody from their money in return for CDs, concert tickets and various bits and bobs.
Indeed, there's more of it than ever. I see artist after artist having golden circles, premier booking, club membership etc etc. Even relatively purist, low-profile acts (like somebody surnamed "Thompson") are doing this now because you need to do that to make money because other revenue streams are not as remunerative as they once were. You can buy a regular show ticket or you can buy a package("premium" or "gold" or whatever) that gets you a meet and greet afterwards, a signed souvenir blah blah blah.
The Stones have been at it for years. No! For
decades. In the early 70s they were under fire in the USA for systematically and unashamedly squeezing every last drop of blood from the stone.
I'm not against money-making in general, far from it, my objection is the specific demographic that the Justin Bieber machine targets: kids. Kids have limited discernment skills and they tend to like what they're told to like, whether they're told by the media at large or simply by their peers. This invariably leads to phenomena like Hannah Montana, Bieber, The Jonas Brothers and so on, which are vehicles put together and managed by large corporations to extract kids' pocket money, essentially for material that is execrable in quality... in essence, what I'm saying is that in this particular instance, kids are actively encouraged to be wasting their money on crap, and thus I object, entirely impotent as my objection is.
Put it this way: when I was 13 (1988) me and my contemporaries blew our pocket money Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and Van Halen albums, 13 year olds now..?
