Blog story short: how Justin Bieber changed my world
My rabid devotion to the Canadian pop sensation didn’t last, but ultimately it was the platform to a career.
In year six, I broke my shoulder trying to win the attention of a boy. He was in year 12, much too old for me, but that didn’t matter.
He had bleached hair, a tattoo that snaked across his chest reading “heroes get remembered, legends never die”, and worked at General Pants. In my underdeveloped suburbanite mind, he was the height of glamour and covetable coolness.
I was playing on the monkey bars when I saw that he and his friends were sitting under a nearby tree. Thus began my mating ritual: I started furiously building up swinging momentum, with the intention of flinging myself off the bars, executing a dazzling airborne display, sticking the landing, and capturing his heart.
Two hours later, I was high on a green whistle and crammed into a bassinet far too small for an 11-year-old, languishing in the corridor of an overcrowded Westmead Children’s Hospital.
This was not my sliding-doors moment. This is merely my way of getting you to understand that when you are a tween girl, you are not a rational actor; typically speaking, there is only one thing in the world that matters: your crush.
Which brings us to Justin Bieber. When I was 13, all of the horrendous, confusing, angry, yearning emotions that come with girlhood were channelled into zealously worshipping this 16-year-old, fop-haired teen idol from Canada.
My teenage bedroom was plastered from wall to ceiling with posters of his beaming mug; I had acquired an unfathomable number of unauthorised biographies, quiz books and annuals.
When his signature colour was purple, you best bet I was dressing like a deranged eggplant. The grape-hued Chuck Taylor sneakers I begged Mum to buy me are, to this day, sitting in her garage – it’s hard to bin the things that remind you of a time when you loved most intensely.
Most egregiously, my love for Bieber led to a brief stint at Hillsong Church, despite growing up completely irreligious.
Bieber fever had turned me into a hysterical, sometimes violent, lunatic. To this day, the two worst fights I’ve had have involved him. One was a screaming row that I had with my mum after she refused to drive me from the suburbs of western Sydney into the city at 4am on a weekday to watch his performance on Sunrise. You spiteful woman. You hateful cow. You don’t understand. I despise you. I wish you were dead. I WISH I WERE DEAD!
The other was with my younger brother who, after I refused to let him have a go on the computer, took his vengeance by scribbling on my copy of Vanity Fair from when Bieber was the cover star. I can’t remember the intricacies of this particular barney, because I was so blinded by rage – all I know is that it climaxed with me chasing him around the living room with a cricket bat, threatening to bludgeon him to a pulp.
Mercifully, I found a place for all this rabid devotion: the blogging platform Tumblr.
Tumblr is all but obsolete now, but for a few years in the 2010s, Tumblr was, for many teenagers around the world, our main portal to culture. My high-school best friend, Kat, introduced me to it in IT class one day. Kat was cooler than me in every conceivable way; she had cotton-candy pink hair that she chopped into a perfectly spherical bowl cut in the style of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and her blog was a crucible of all things good taste: 2000s photos of Julian Casablancas from the Strokes, stills from cult John Waters films, close-up runway photos from Alexander McQueen shows.
Tumblr was brilliant because it was unselfconscious. People didn’t really care what you looked like or how intelligent you were. There was none of that pressure to fire off incisive hot takes about current events. All that mattered was discovering what you were interested in, finding a community for it and devoting yourself to it entirely. Naturally, I started a Justin Bieber blog. The URL of which is far too embarrassing to print, but know it was a portmanteau of Bieber and orgasm.
Running this thing consumed my life. I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning, laptop light shrouded by a duvet, learning HTML coding so I could customise my blog theme. The speed at which I was sharing new paparazzi photos of Bieber could’ve put Perez Hilton out of business.
That my commitment to blogging routinely had me falling asleep in class the next day didn’t matter because my followers were growing. Within a year I had 50,000 followers and a grade average of D. I had completely lost interest in Bieber and moved on to worshipping Robert Smith, but my followers stayed loyal.
At that time, there was a musician kid in the grade above me who was sharing covers on YouTube. They weren’t getting many views and I felt sorry for him. He was cute and had blonde, swishy hair that I thought might resonate with my fellow fangirls.
Thinking nothing of it, I shared one of his videos on my blog. It blew up. Within 24 hours, it had more than 100,000 notes – which, in Tumblr jargon, translates to likes, reposts and replies – and the views on his YouTube channel skyrocketed.
An abridged version of the following few months: off the back of that momentum, he started a band with some other guys in his grade (one of whom would go on to be my boyfriend); like a 14-year-old Malcolm McLaren prodigy, I suggested they cover a Bieber song, which they did, and it went gangbusters. The band signed a publishing deal with a major label. They’re now one of the most successful Australian music exports of all time.
I appreciate that this sounds like a big fat porky pie, but ask yourself, who would make up a story so embarrassing? I can’t take credit for their success, either; that was all them – I was merely a conduit to the world of obsessive teenage girls.
As to how this plays into my sliding-doors moment – because I was associated with this band, my Twitter and Instagram followers grew. Which was handy because Tumblr was on its deathbed. And, at 16, I had a short-lived stint as a reluctant teenage influencer.
I couldn’t hack being an influencer. There’s something so soul-corrodingly naff about self-promotion. But for a few years I milked it for all it was worth and wound up on an all-expenses-paid trip to Splendour in the Grass, where I met a music photographer, Jess.
Jess would go on to be one of my most treasured friends and future housemate. It was because of her that I got my first job in journalism – writing about music in the now-defunct street rag, The Brag – and never looked back.