While everyone was ragging on Miley Cyrus and her hammer-licking antics in the Wrecking Ball video, Justin Bieber was cooking up a new treat for pop culture fiends to point and laugh at. And we missed it … almost.
The 19-year-old's latest appearance is a feature in Lolly, the new single from R&B artist Maejor Ali. A song about drugs and women and licking, lots of licking, served with a side of Bieber rapping his transition-to-adulthood little heart out in a very cringeworthy fashion.
"I'm all fancy, yeah, I'm popping Pellegrino/I'm in the El Camino when I pull up on the scen-o", he rhymes. Or not so much … What Justin?
Surely if he's not old enough to rap about alcohol and has to use mineral water as a substitute, he's not nearly old enough to be singing about his ding-dong and how much girls like it, or to be featured in a song about drugs, period.
(Where is all the rage and hype about race appropriation now? Because seriously, it's needed. And if someone could write it in Dr Seuss fashion, that would be great, I think the Biebs would understand it better.)
To top it all off, the dance featured in the video has now been touted as the "lolly dance". Granted, there are no "home girls here with the big butt, shaking it like we at a strip club" – thank you Miley for your poetic references to twerking in We Can't Stop – and although the video is sans tonguing of hardware and the dance is fairly innocent, it's the subject matter of the song that Justin is asking his teen fans to "lolly dance" to that's questionable.
While it's fairly safe to assume that the lyrics Justin sings – "She say she love my lolly, she wanna make it pop, she say she love my lolly, she wanna lick the top" – are in reference to his penis (this image is still wrong, so wrong), there are also references to Molly, a club term for ecstasy. Another artist featured on the track, Juicy J, sings: "Molly make her lose them underwear."
Playground crushes
Are you condoning the use of drugs to take advantage of women, Mr Bieber, in the hope they will love your lolly? Three problems exist.
1. Again, where is the outcry?
2. Justin's fan base at this stage are mostly girls who are not of consensual age yet. (Are these references and the innocence of young girls being subjected to it not bothering anyone else yet?)
3. When these girls do grow up and realise you condoned all sorts of things by singing about them willy-nilly, while hiding behind some pseudo-dance, they're going to do everything but love your lolly.
I realise that pop stars who grow up on Twitter and our televisions do in fact still grow up. They move from cute, cuddly, talented little things who sing about playground crushes, to teenagers who have experiences with drugs and alcohol and run-ins with the law, to eventually featuring all of this in their music.
But do we as an audience, or rather, does Justin Bieber's female, impressionable, school-going audience really need that proven to them? In the most crass way? We get it. You're growing. Take a time out if you need to and then come back and get on with it. cc Miley Cyrus.