Two celebrity posts in a day. I’m slipping. Still, I ran across two different Bieber articles in the span of two minutes and couldn’t resist. The first has this amusing line regarding Bieber’s singing future once puberty strikes:
As The-Dream put it, describing the sound of Bieber’s new material, Justin is “somewhere between Fergie and Jesus”. Even Jesus Christ’s voice had to break some time.
Why mention Jesus, I wonder?
Then I came across an article about Paramount and the generated hype around Never Say Never. I don’t listen to his stuff so I had no idea he was so Christian.
USA Today reports that Paramount, the studio behind tomorrow’s 3-D Bieber documentary, “has screened the movie for faith leaders across the country and distributed spiritual discussion guides — the same tools used to promote The Passion of the Christ and The Blind Side as family-friendly fare.”
As the story goes: Bieber’s mother Pattie Mallette originally envisioned a Christian music career for her little wunderkind, hilariously telling the New York Times that when Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun first approached her, she “prayed, ‘God, you don’t want this Jewish kid to be Justin’s man, do you?’” But the religious partisanship is not quite so overt in Never: While the flick apparently features Bieber praying before concerts, the main Christian peg is a kind of vague declaration that, partially through faith, you too may one day become a multimillionaire teenage pop star, or whatever your own personal equivalent of that might be. (For the record, ours is “multimillionaire teenage pop star.” Never say never!) Or, as Paramount’s “spiritual resource guide” puts it: “[The movie] provides an opportunity to teach our children about … the power of prayer.”
It’s a marketing gimmick, all right. They want to make sure the Christian kids can drag their parents into theaters to see it. How else will they make more money on it? It’s not like a film produced by some offside studio that will only interest church leaders and the flocks they buy tickets for. It’s Justin Bieber, Canada’s most recent gift to pop culture.
You deserve it. You’re welcome.
I get a chance to look over the CDs while I’m at work sometimes and have gotten into the habit of looking at the inlay for the tell tale “I thank God for this…” line that will mean the difference between me sneering and me borrowing the thing. I think far too many stars pull Jesus and God out primarily as tools to ensure they don’t lose a whole crop of potential fans. “I pray to God the almighty Swather…”
allow Scooter to make an ineffectual case: “There are some stars who speak their faith because they’re trying to do outreach to that audience and there are others who share that side of their lives because that’s who they are. And I think that’s just who Justin is.” We certainly won’t be making any declarations about “who Justin is” around here — but screening the film ahead of time for faith leaders sounds much more like the former than the latter.
I agree. They want to promote him as a good Christian boy and therefore it’s worth it for Christians to pay money to see him rather than promote him as a good singer everyone should pay to see. If his voice breaks and singing coaches can’t fix the damage wrought by aging, he’ll soon be done anyway. Then he’ll be forced to take up acting or something…
Flying Spaghetti Monster, help us…
One Minion's Opinion 