An Uncle Reports From The Justin Bieber Show
“The Justin Bieber gig is over and obviously there’s no one better to recap it than a guy who knows maybe three songs and who, had he been careless in college, would’ve attended the show with his kid.
So, first things first: a lot of people have asked me, why O why did you, Ashish Shakya, connoisseur of the fine arts and love-maker extraordinaire, subject yourself to this? The answer to this is the line that defines my social life: I’ll go if it’s near my house.
I grew up in Nerul, Navi Mumbai, where the most fun thing to do was to go to Colaba. The most exciting celebrity presence was when – true story – someone spotted one of the guys from A Band Of Boys in my colony. And even he didn’t live there – he was just visiting his parents, probably to explain to them the complex nuances of his band name.
So of course, one of the world’s biggest pop stars performing on the same campus where Abey “Who?” Kuruvilla once used to bowl, was a momentous occasion. But more importantly, it was free.
This complimentary access meant that my friends and I – a group of 30-somethings, along with two actual Beliebers in their early 20s – could saunter in at 6.30 p.m., unlike the poor kids who’d started lining up for free heat strokes at 2 p.m. This helped because the humidity situation was what you’d expect in May, i.e. you could drink straight from the air.
I went in with an open mind, as is only proper because I have, on a couple of occasions, drunk-karaoke’d to Bieber’s ‘Baby’. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a fan of Bieber – it just means that I’m a fan of drinking. Pour enough in me and I’ll sing out the obituary section of a newspaper.
I didn’t expect to be blown away but I figured, hey, this was an international act worth hundreds of millions of dollars so surely they’d put up some sort of performance spectacle. What, I wondered, are these foreigners doing at gigs that we aren’t doing here?
Well, for starters, lip-syncing. Now a common reaction to this has been, “Yah but u shud have known about lip-sync earlier wat r u dumb I AM SO KOOL I ONLY LISTEN 2 ROCK.” First of all, keep your smugness in your pants. I left my shame lying somewhere back in my 20s, along with my metabolism, so your musical snobbery is useless here.
And secondly, I’m glad that I didn’t know in advance, because it would’ve been a spoiler for my favourite moment of the show. It came when Bieber was wiping his face with a towel such that the towel covered his entire face, and the vocals just played on unchanged.
That was when I laughed out loud and couldn’t stop because that, ladies and gentlemen, is an astounding lack of fucks. You’ll find more fucks per capita in a monastery. I have seen the BMC give more fucks about Mumbai roads, and they all look like Captain Planet dug ‘em up trying to locate Gaia’s G-spot.
This was like watching Bobby Deol “hack” Akshay Kumar’s password in Ajnabee – you knew everyone involved was tired and just wanted to leave, so they said, “Fuck it, ‘Everything Is Planned’ likh do, ghar jaake Taarak Mehta dekhna hai.”
Imagine that Ajnabee level of nonchalance, but LIVE, on a multimillion-dollar scale. Imagine the smiles of a thousand Beliebers wilting in unison, their hearts shattering as the myth of their Piper dissolved before them, while thousands of others still stayed strong and did not let their fandom waver, even in the face of irrefutable evidence. This is also how the nationalism debate works.
