Exactly, which is my point. Nothing changes the fact that she was huge and her name is pretty big. Just that she is not the “IT” artist right now. Which is okay.
Prince is a megastar, and is Beyoncé.
And my point is that the things that he is talented at are … unimportant. He’s an adequate performer with smart management and a great P.R. team that positioned him well to succeed, especially marketed to pre-teen girls. He’s not the first, nor will he be the last. But let’s not pretend that he’s made it based solely on his talent.
Your argument is based on equivocating “talent” and “results.” You argue that Bieber is talented because… just look at the results! The people on AI were not as talented because they didn’t get the same level of results.
But that’s not how we judge talent. We judge it by looking at the talent itself. That’s what I did in my post: I looked at all of the things in which he could be said to be talented, and I assessed them. You aren’t doing that. The reason you aren’t is that you want to take the contrarian position that Bieber is talented, which most people here basically disagree with, for good reasons. He is not particularly a great singer, a great dancer, or a great songwriter (he is competent but far from amazing in the first two areas). I offered up good lucks and charisma as the actual talent that he has, and I think that’s right. I also think that’s not the type of talent that intellectual people respect all that much, and thus people here are saying that Bieber is not talented. I.e., not talented in the ways they respect.
You look at the finalists on AI and they can definitely sing better than Bieber.
I agree and disagree at the same time. I agree in that he and his family did a great job of promoting him on there, albeit in a time that is already quite different than YouTube now. I disagree in that there is always going to be a lottery+snowball effect with YouTube: there will always be some stars on there, and being a star helps you become a bigger star.
Example, this guy did a brilliant, very professional video for one of the best new songs I’ve heard in years, and I literally can’t believe he only has just under 32,000 views, which in the world of YouTube is both something and nothing at the same time (do please watch it, it’s amazing):
Meanwhile, Pewdiepie is like a billionaire by now for doing Let's Play videos. I'm not saying the former deserves megamillions or that the latter deserves nothing, but I do think it's kinda screwed up. And I say that understanding that there is obviously a big market for Let's Play videos. My daughter watches them and I think they can be quite fun and informative.OK, so what does it take? Don’t say “talent”! What kind of talent does Bieber actually have that made him better than the AI contenders?
Because, no matter what kind of talent you can name, TPTB actually do have access to that. According to your quote, they have no problem getting their hands on charisma and looks. We know from AI that they have no issue getting their hands on vocal talent. So presumably they can also get their hands on a combo of charisma, looks, and voice without too much trouble? So extrapolating from your logic (if I may be so bold), they should be able to produce a Bieber a week anyway. But obviously they can’t.
And the reason is the saturation of the market + luck. A dominating talent like a Michael Jackson can demand fame and riches from the market; everyone else has to beg.
Incorrect! We already see as many stars of his stature as the market can possibly hold. People are already listening to as much music as they can listen to. They are already paying as much attention to celebs as they can. This is not a growth market. It is saturated. It is a fight for market share. Anyone with Bieber’s level of talent who appeared would not be automatically recognized but would have to fight for attention, and many would fail out of sheer bad luck. Only someone with many times more talent than he could demand attention.
Cool. That is very, very different than what the OP is saying. You are saying she may not be in her heyday now (a different discussion), but her body of work to date warrants megastar status. He asserts that she is anointed as a “megastar” but has never really been any good, and is “beige and boring.”
No, actually, her opinion makes sense and provides a better understanding of what’s going on with her fame level these days.
Waitaminnit - are you saying your ignorance is fought?
Absolutely.
Excellent. That’s the overall mission here. Better than debate more for sport.
Whoa.
Mind. Blown. ALL HAS BECOME CLEAR.
He’s a lot taller than I thought.
And less purple.
Not really. The issue was that someone said he had NO talent, and my rebuttal was that people with NO talent do not become superstars like Justin Bieber.
Again, not really. The issue was that you were saying that AI and other shows can find talents like Bieber, and that Bieber’s success was mostly a function of being in a good system so to speak. The issue I raised is that AI provides as good a system, and get worse results. The main differentiator is the performer, and based in part on that, it can be inferred that talented people like Bieber are not as common as you would make it seem.
I don’t need to. Multiple people with expertise far beyond you or I have already done that. That is part of why he is successful and has be given the opportunities he has. Smart people don’t invest tons of money over multiple years in people who are not talented. It just doesn’t happen.
I would contend you know far too little about him, his songwriting skills, or his dancing to make an informed opinion. You didn’t even know he has an album coming out this year. I guarantee you couldn’t name 10 of his songs, yet you think you are able to judge how good a writer he is?
Which again brings up back to square one. These so called intellectuals are full of shit. Their appraisal of talent, whether someone is a megastar, or how popular someone is is filtered through a really distortive, elitist lens. The fact is that someone else’s talent is not dependent on you accepting it or seeing it. It has nothing to do with you, and not admitting that shows a huge lack of humility and perspective. Once you are done reading the above sentence, please go back and read it again.
How do you know this, and what qualifications do you have to say this? Now you are making a qualitative statement rather than stating your (uninformed) opinion. Could you even tell me 5 of the finalists from the last AI without looking it up? Regardless, they very well may be as talented as Bieber. That is really not the issue. The issue is saying he has NO talent is foolish.
Which is true for any scalable endeavor. The point is that he managed to be seen in a crowd of millions of people. The idea that those people weren’t attracted to his talent is without basis.
I watched it. I am not as impressed as you are. Notice I didn’t say the guy has no talent.
I don’t watch AI so I wouldn’t be qualified to say.
There are breakout stars every year, so you comment makes no sense. People like Adele, Katy Perry, Bieber, 5SOS, Ariana Grande, Kendrick Lamar, Iggy Azalea , are all fairly recent stars. The is not really a saturation point for music. If it were so easy to make another Bieber or Iggy or Ariana, they would not be stopping making them.
Complete and utter nonsense. Even if you assume the market in total is topped out, there should still be available market share to steal from other sources. That said, people are not listening to as much music as they can listen to. I don’t know how any informed person can make such an absurd argument. Services like Spotify and Pandora have grown year after year and Spotify in particular only launched in the US less than 4 years ago.
I never said that, and I would agree with your statement above. But it is essentially an argument at cross purposes. He is not talented in way that causes them to respect him as a musician, and in the case of Bieber, that makes total sense and I agree.
Not exactly what I was saying. They are trying to use the shows kills two birds with one stone: find the people that can sell and actually sell them in the process. It has worked on occasion but isn’t dependable. I actually would say that the show The Voice is unintentionally set up to promote people who won’t sell. As for Bieber, it’s what I said it was, including the luck factor.
It’s just a fact that the market and the media can only support so many acts at once, and that number will always be at maximum. Talent isn’t actually the bottleneck.
This is multifacetedly wrong. First, it’s a straight-up argument from authority in which you don’t even bother to identify the authority. Second, there will always be people who will sell what they think will sell, even if they don’t think it’s good. You don’t know what the opinion is of the people that promote and serve Bieber in various way. Third, that is not how you debate talent. You state your own opinion. If you think Bieber has talent, state the ways in which you think he’s talented. Otherwise, you are just asserting that he is marketable and marketability proves talent or is the same thing. We already know that he is marketable.
You are not actually making the assertion that he does write a significant portion of his material, and I’ve never heard the claim that he does, so my null hypothesis is that he doesn’t. I said his dancing and singing are competent.
Arguments are always weird when they are about matters of opinion and one side doesn’t understand how opinions work. I’ve formed my opinion about Bieber based on what I’ve experienced about him–kinda like everyone else. I don’t get what you’re saying is elitist or incorrect in this case. If said I was a Bieber scholar and didn’t have the knowledge to back that up, that would be different.
I’ve watched that kind of show, which is all one needs to do to know there are always a lot of great singers. Singing talent is not rare. Bieber in fact is not a great belter like a Whitney (not that she was merely that), nor a distinctive original singer like a Dylan. He’s just competent. And to repeat, I never said he didn’t have talent.
I agree. He’s cute and charismatic and appealed to tween girls. That’s his chief talent.
First you assert that they keep making them, and then you say that it’s not easy to make them?
I don’t think it’s easy to make anything happen in the music business. That was my original point. From the beginning, most acts the record companies throw out there have been failures. It takes a truly dominating level of talent a la Michael Jackson to have a surefire success. What will stick is unpredictable and luck is a huge factor. People can also be out very quickly. I wouldn’t have guessed that the crappy song “Blurred Lines” would be the big hit of 2014, and I wouldn’t have guessed that Robin Thicke would be a disgraced adulterer in meltdown mode soon thereafter. Bieber is a brand that they will try to sell until he doesn’t, at which point he will be put out on the curb like a sack of trash. Will his upcoming album do well? I’m not sure, but I think the transition from fresh young face to adult artist would have been very difficult even without his recent dissipated behavior.
My expertise is in marketing. It’s not nonsense. For example, there is a concept of “share of belly” with respect to beverages, and it’s recognized that people are already drinking as much as they’re going to drink. As you said, it’s all about stealing market share.
Sure, people could spend 24 hours a day listening to music, but the fact of the matter is that the record industry is worth much less by any measure than it used to be. Blame downloading, whatever. The industry is able to support fewer artists than it used to. I’m sure you aware that Spotify is serving to beggar artists even further, as it cannibalizes iTune sales yet pays them virtually nothing in royalties.
I think the rest of the paragraph that sentence was in explains my position pretty well. No matter what your arguments are, it may fall short of convincing me that she’s special in any terms other than her marketing juggernaut. Again, art is subjective, the audience has as much say in what’s good as the performer does, and the audience’s context usually makes or breaks the art. Sometimes the audience catches up, sometimes it leaves the artist behind.
If I sound arrogant for stating it plainly, so be it. I’ve been trained in fine arts, and been performing music publicly and reading criticism of it off and on for 25-odd years. In my understanding, that’s pretty much how it works.
You say you like to dance to her music, that’s something. I don’t particularly listen for songs as something to dance to (but I do dance, very badly), so that’s a partial explanation. However, since you don’t personally view her as anything special, I’m not sure that your explanation convinces me why she’s special. It doesn’t really answer why she’s a mega-star. Lots of people have catchy, quotable, dance-able songs.
Ok, but it seems that you’re just defining mega-star, and using her as an example. It doesn’t really answer the question as to why she’s the one who made it for that period.
To give a example of a group who I didn’t “get” as a star, but I do understand now: Depeche Mode. I absolutely loathed their music when it was contemporary, and am not a fan now. The sounds they preferred from their synths and the production of their records absolutely grated on me then, and I’m not a fan today. When I and my contemporaries debated them, absolutely no-one argued “they actually have really good song writing, even if you don’t like the performance”. After hearing many different covers of their songs, done in a manner that was far more appealing to me, I’ve got to admit that they had some damn good songwriting going on. That, combined with some pretty-boy good looks (that were never going to sell any records to yours truly), explains why people who aren’t fixated on the things I am bought their records in droves.
I’m not asking you to let 25-30 years pass and cover Beyonce’s songs to convince me, but I’ve only seen alexandra do much else besides declare she’s a mega-star, or measure her mega-starness, and call it a day. I’ll probably give that record a free listen again under their advice and see if I can at least understand why it stands out. Beyonce’s music doesn’t grate on me the way that DM does, but it seems unremarkable compared to its contemporaries, and I’m trying to figure out why it rose to the top in the minds of others. If the answer at the end if the day is that it’s down to luck and marketing, that’s ok, but that’s what it is. If it’s not that, it’d be nice to know in 60 years why she’s not today’s Pat Boone when my cyborg version is figuring out a set list.
I do think that Beyonce is quite good at what she does, even if I probably wouldn’t pause in a doorway to hear more of it. But she has a lot of contemporaries who seem to be just as good. I could probably write a decent sized pamphlet on why I think Prince beat out Madonna as a music god,but Madonna was probably commercially bigger at her peak. I can convince even the most hard boiled punk rocker that Prince has groove and chops for days. If groove and chops aren’t the thing that makes them get up and put a record on, Prince isn’t going to ever make their playlist. No one has ever explained to me why they’d cross the street to listen to a Madonna song in a way that makes any sense to me, and I can’t bear to listen to her music; so she appears to be comprised completely of image. So it goes.
After Michael’s death, there were a bajillion threads started. In a few of those threads, there were people arguing earnestly that Mike wasn’t all that.
I didn’t try to answer that question, mainly because I don’t find the question interesting. The OP said he doesn’t “believe in” Beyonce as a megastar. Taht’s the only part I was answering.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Michael (I did like a lot of the early pop hits of the Jackson 5), but so what? Even if I HATED him, I’d have to acknowledge he was by far the biggest star in music in the Eighties.
Even if I HATED Elvis or the Beatles, I’d have to acknowledge that each act was a musical phenomenon.
Beyond Elvis, the Beatles and Michael, have there been any other musical “megastars”? I think Elton John was one (or came close) in the Seventies. I think both Madonna and Bruce Springsteen may have been, for a few years, in the Eighties. U2 may qualify, but I’m not sure.
This isn’t about my FAVORITE acts. No one can accuse me of being a big Madonna or Springsteen fan, but as I see it, if you sell tons of records, fill up big stadiums, widely affect fashions (maybe even politics), and make your presence felt in multiple media, you’re a superstar.
Does Beyoncé qualify? Matter of opinion, but I’d say no, DESPITE the fact that she’s undeniably talented, attractive and popular.