The Bieber is no Rebell is is is Just Just Slooow Car Crash
The sight of Justin Bieber in an orange prison uniform was shocking not just for the story that lay behind it but for the smirk plastered on his face.
The 19-year-old pop star had been arrested after a drink-and-drugs bender that led to him racing a yellow Lamborghini through a residential street at 4am.
He admitted to police that he’d spent the day getting high on booze, marijuana and anti-depressants.
Yet far from being ashamed of his drug-fuelled law breaking — he faces up to a year in jail — Bieber grinned for the camera and laughed in court, as if the whole sorry scene was part of some pop promotional video.
Which in a way, I fear it was. Here was the self-styled rebel without a cause, hell-bent on self-destruction. Or at least boosting his street cred.
It wasn’t just that smile. For his mugshots, Bieber had also styled his hair into a perfect Elvis quiff.
After leaving court, he emerged from the rooftop of his car in a black hoodie — and raised a defiant salute to his fans all over the world.
Remorse? Contrition? Shame? Forget it. Here was a star milking every second of his new notoriety, while casting off the squeaky-clean image of his youth.
Not since Ali G has there been such a pathetic attempt to be a ‘gangsta’ as the new Justin Bieber.
How else to explain the pictures of him before the arrest, in Miami Beach’s trendy SET nightclub, bare-chested and surrounded by friends and booze, clearly out of his head? Or the £45,000 he reportedly spent in one strip club at the weekend? Or the pictures of him posing alongside his Lamborghini in low-hanging leather black jeans and covered in bling, with girlfriend Chantel Jeffries at his side? The same girlfriend, incidentally, who once knifed another woman.
The combined effect on Bieber’s impressionable fans is that their idol is not just some reckless idiot heading for an early grave, but a cool dude having a great time and sticking two fingers up at the authorities.
Yes, you can blame his mother, a former addict whom he claims has been giving him prescription drugs, or his tattooed hanger-on father, who was with him on the day of the arrest. But all around him are in denial.
His manager Scooter Brown tweeted after his arrest: ‘We are defined by how we handle adversity. Love fully in good times & bad.’
Adversity? More like a car crash in slow motion. What an appalling way for a young man with such privilege to live his life. And what a toxic influence on his young fans.
‘I only hit her once with an open hand.’ So says Stan Collymore, defending his 1998 attack on Ulrika Jonsson in response to her comments this week that he deserves no sympathy for becoming the target of Twitter trolls.
He also says he will sue over her account of the assault, during which, she says, he kicked her in the head three times.
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