In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
In May 2009, little baby teen idol Justin Bieber released his debut single “One Time.” When the song came out, Bieber was just a couple of months past his 15th birthday. If anything, he looked and sounded even younger than that. “One Time” was a pretty big hit for a new artist, going all the way to #17 on the Hot 100. Over the next six years, Bieber kept knocking out pretty big hits, landing something like 45 more songs on the Hot 100. (That’s what Songfacts says, and I’m not going in there with a calculator to check. Point is: It was a lot of songs.) All of those songs did numbers. None of them made it all the way to #1.
To cross that final pop-star barrier, Justin Bieber had to do a lot of things. He had to attract and encourage a virtual army of very young, very online superfans. He had to deal with the backlash that tends to surround fresh-faced teen idols, and he had to give fuel to that backlash by publicly engaging in all sorts of dumb, annoying public behavior. He had to keep reinventing himself, both as a singer and as a persona. And he had to keep making pretty good music. Finally, everything lined up just right for 21-year-old Justin Bieber in 2015. Since then, we haven’t been able to keep him out of the #1 spot. He just keeps coming back.
The PR campaign behind “What Do You Mean?,” the song that finally pushed Bieber to the #1 spot, is a masterclass in pop-star reinvention. Before that single, Justin Bieber came close to topping the Hot 100 a few times, but he never closed the deal. The backlash was just too much. Bieber always had a gigantic fanbase, but he inspired something like loathing in the public at large, even before he started doing some of the bonehead shit that kept that loathing alive. His music sold in big numbers, but radio stayed away. Those songs were for the starry-eyed Beliebers, not for the general public.
In 2015, things changed. Radio play became increasingly less important to the Hot 100, and streaming numbers and download sales were enough to push a song to #1. At the same time, Bieber launched a charm offensive that doubled as an apology tour, and his image-rehab efforts paid off. Finally, the young man started making music that appealed to people outside his little-kid base. It was a gradual process, and it all led up to “What Do You Mean?” crashing the Hot 100 and debuting at #1 with a song that felt a little like a commentary on what it’s like to be Justin Bieber. It seems pretty bad! I like the song, though.
Justin Bieber went on a wild, twisty ride before he first landed at #1. In a lot of ways, Bieber’s career is a case study for everything that can happen, both good and bad, with a teen idol’s career. When you’re a teen idol, a certain segment of the population will love you without reservation, and another, usually larger segment will hate you with a burning passion. That can mess a kid’s head up. On top of all that, Bieber is also a prototypical story of the internet rocketing someone to global fame before he’s even remotely ready. In this case, YouTube is the force that beamed Bieber into so many brains.
Justin Drew Bieber was born in London, Ontario, and he grew up in Stratford, a tiny city near there. (When Bieber was born, Céline Dion’s “The Power Of Love” was the #1 song in both the US and Canada.) Bieber’s parents were both working-class teenagers. His father, a carpenter and semi-pro MMA fighter, wasn’t around for most of his childhood, though he joined Justin’s entourage after the kid got famous. Justin’s mother worked a series of go-nowhere jobs and raised him in a virulently Christian household.
As a kid, Justin Bieber fell in love with music and learned a bunch of instruments. In 2007, the 12-year-old Bieber covered Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” in a singing competition, and his mother posted a murky video on YouTube. In that video, you can see that the baby Bieber has real talent — clean tone, weird little-kid sincerity, clear connection to the material. Bieber won the competition, earning a few thousand bucks, and he and his mom used the money to go to Disneyland. He liked the attention that he got from the video, so he started singing more cover songs, and his mom posted more videos.
Those early videos got Justin Bieber a little bit of a teen-girl audience, but his real break happened when Scooter Braun accidentally clicked on the video of that “So Sick” cover. Braun, a guy who will be an important peripheral character in this column for a while, was an Atlanta party promoter who’d just gotten into music management, pushing the buzzy and fratty white rapper Asher Roth. (Roth’s highest-charting single, the Weezer-sampling 2009 track “I Love College,” peaked at #12.)
Once he saw that video, Scooter Braun immediately went into research overdrive and finally got in contact with Bieber’s mother. Bieber’s mom was hugely reluctant to have anything to do with Braun because Braun was Jewish. She wanted Bieber to be a Christian singer, and she’s quoted in The New York Times, saying, “I prayed, ‘God, you don’t want this Jewish kid to be Justin’s man, do you?… You could send me a Christian man, a Christian label!'” But church elders convinced Bieber’s mom that it was OK, so she let Braun fly Bieber down to Atlanta to record demos.
Under Scooter Braun’s direction, Justin Bieber kept posting videos, and those videos got more attention. Braun got both Usher and Justin Timberlake, two guys who have been in this column a lot, interested in the prospect of signing Bieber. Bieber thought of himself as an R&B singer, and he wanted that Usher connection. Together, Braun and Usher formed a label called RBMG Records specifically to sign Bieber. They took him to Def Jam, and LA Reid brought the 14-year-old Bieber aboard in 2008. Bieber and his mother moved to Atlanta, and Braun became his manager.
In his early career, Justin Bieber worked with producers who knew how to bridge the divide between R&B and down-the-middle pop: The-Dream, Tricky Stewart, Benny Blanco. Bieber was presented as Usher’s protege, and he was marketed to kid-friendly outlets like Radio Disney. His first two singles, “One Time” and “One Less Lonely Girl,” both went top-20, and his My World EP came out near the end of 2009. But the real breakout moment was “Baby,” a Dream/Tricky Stewart production with a guest verse from Ludacris, someone who’s been in this column a handful of times. The “Baby” single came out in January 2010, and it turned Bieber into a supernova.
After a serious marketing campaign, “Baby” debuted at #5 and then plummeted down the chart. (It’s a 7.) That established a pattern. Right away, Justin Bieber had fans who would buy his stuff, but the larger world took one look at him and said no thanks. Bieber’s look — bright smile, floppy hair — called back to the Tiger Beat dreamboats of the ’70s, and inspired the same kind of angry-boy revulsion as New Kids On The Block did when I was a kid. If the Hot 100 factored in YouTube plays in 2010, “Baby” would’ve done a lot better. For a while, it was the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, and it’s still one of Bieber’s best-known songs.
“Baby” launched Bieber’s debut album My World 2.0, which came out in March 2010 and eventually went quadruple platinum. Bieber went on a media blitz and spent the summer touring arenas — just in time for his voice to change. Step Up 3D auteur Jon Chu filmed those shows for the 3D concert movie Never Say Never, which came out early in 2011 and made a bunch of money. (Chu has made a bunch of bigger movies since then, but he’ll always be the Step Up 3D guy to me. That movie rules.) To promote his cinematic endeavor, Bieber teamed up with fellow child star Jaden Smith to release a single called “Never Say Never,” and it became his second top-10 hit, peaking at #8. (It’s a 4.)
The early Justin Bieber thing was a spectacle. Bieber’s young fans went into screaming fits whenever he went anywhere or did anything, which is pretty standard in teen-idol situations. But they also developed their own online community, watching chart numbers and devoting themselves to Bieber’s career, which was new. That kind of stan-army culture would become more and more central to pop music over the years, and Bieber was a very early case. Bieber and his team kept pumping out product to meet that demand, and the Beliebers kept buying. The 2011 Christmas album Under The Mistletoe went double platinum, and its not-good single “Mistletoe” peaked at #11, very high for a holiday song.
Justin Bieber’s 2012 album Believe was supposed to be the one that transformed him into a mainstream pop star, rather than just a teen-idol phenomenon. It basically worked. Bieber cut that shag haircut, which most of us still think of as the Bieber cut, and he collaborated with rappers like Drake and Big Sean, adapting some of their swagger for himself. “Believe” sent three songs into the top-10, and Timberlake-esque lead single “Boyfriend” peaked at #2. (It’s a 7.)
Believe went triple platinum, but it didn’t shake the threat of the continuous Bieber backlash overwhelming the fan enthusiasm for him. He was still a site of conflict, not an agreed-upon mainstream superstar. He also didn’t fit in terribly well with the booming EDM-pop sound of they day, and he got kind of lost in the Max Martin/Zedd production of “Beauty And The Beat,” a collaboration with future Number Ones artist Nicki Minaj. (That song peaked at #5. It’s a 6.)
People continued to hate Justin Bieber, and he kept giving them fuel. When he hosted SNL in 2013, he bombed, and the cast hated him. Bieber got caught on camera pissing in a restaurant’s mop bucket and flipping off a photo of Bill Clinton. He had to pay a big fine for egging a neighbor’s house in Calabasas. During a visit to the Anne Frank museum, Bieber wrote the following message in the guestbook: “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber” — honestly the funniest and most clueless thing he could’ve possibly written.
People acted all outraged about Bieber’s antics, but honestly, who gives a shit? The piss in a bucket is gross, but motherfuck Bill Clinton. Most if not all of the houses in Calabasas probably deserve to be egged. The Anne Frank message is just a beautiful display of sheltered idiocy. All of those stumbles inspired the movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. It’s one of this century’s great comedies, and it only slightly exaggerates the type of shit Bieber was doing. Some of Bieber’s antics were not cute — the DUI charges, the resurfaced videos of pre-fame Bieber telling racist jokes. All those stories had a cumulative effect, painting Bieber as an entitled no-talent dumbass who couldn’t stop tripping over his own dick. Beyond the still-passionate Belieber base, greater mainstream acceptance seemed more and more out of reach.
Amidst all these PR nightmares, Bieber was trying to seize control of his own musical direction. By all indications, Bieber really just wanted to make ’90s-style R&B, not the big and bright pop songs that his handlers were feeding him. In 2013, he started up an initiative where he released one song per week for a few months, and those songs were then collected into the album Journals. It’s much more grown-up and R&B than anything that Bieber had released before that.
Bieber co-wrote most of those Journals tracks with Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd, an R&B songwriter who became his most trusted collaborator. Poo Bear got his start working with the Atlanta R&B group 112 in the early ’00s, co-writing their 2001 hit “Peaches And Cream,” which peaked at #4. (It’s a 9.) Later on, he also co-wrote “Caught Up,” a #8 hit for Bieber’s mentor Usher. (That one is an 8.) Bieber and Poo Bear found an immediate rapport, and Poo Bear truly became Bieber’s guy. At first, though, the public wasn’t really buying R&B Bieber. Journals didn’t get much of a Def Jam push, and lead single “Heartbreaker” peaked at #13. The other album tracks all charted, but they did middling numbers.
In 2015, Justin Bieber was a brand in crisis. In March of that year, he submitted to a Comedy Central roast, which had previously been the domain of show-business has-beens like William Shatner and David Hasselhoff. (I’d argue that Bieber is one of only two people whose career peaked after serving as the subject of one of those roasts; the other is Donald Trump.) A month before the roast, Bieber made the song that would launch his comeback. The dance producers Diplo and Skrillex were making an album together under the duo name Jack Ü, and they had the leftfield idea to make a song with Bieber. Bieber and Poo Bear had written what they thought was a ballad, and when Diplo and Skrillex got ahold of the track, it turned into “Where Are Ü Now.”
“Where Are Ü Now” was the sweet spot. It’s a sleek, playful dance track with all sorts of cool drum-programming and vocal-processing tricks. At the center of all of it is a truly gorgeous Justin Bieber vocal. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but he sounds lost and chastened. Bieber was still just 21, and he’d spent a huge amount of his life in the public eye. That song showcased the agile fragility of his voice — this crystalline vulnerability that might’ve been what all those Beliebers heard in the first place.
In a lot of ways, “Where Are Ü Now” anticipated the pop-chart moment for tropical house, and it became a critical favorite and a surprise hit, peaking at #8. (It’s a 10.) In the first New York Times Diary Of A Song video, Diplo tells a story about Bieber singing the song in a Vegas club and hearing adults scream for him for the first time. Bieber was already working on a new album called Purpose, but the success of “Where Are Ü Now” gave him new buzz and momentum, as well as a new direction. If he could sync his own crushed, empathetic vocals and R&B songwriting chops up with sparkling, futuristic dance-pop production, he might really have something.
At the 2015 VMAs, Justin Bieber performed “Where Are Ü Now,” and he turned it into a medley with his new single, a similarly pitched track called “What Do You Mean?” Bieber, never a great dancer, got impressively fluid with the choreography. At the end of the second song, Bieber floated above the audience while an impressive light-show display went off around him. When he returned to the stage, he was in tears. The moment couldn’t have been scripted any better; crying on live TV is a crucial rite of wayward pop-star penance.
“What Do You Mean?” sounds a lot like “Where Are Ü Now,” and I mean that as a compliment. Bieber and his team realized they had something that worked, and they went with it. Plenty of outlets erroneously reported that Skrillex produced “What Do You Mean?,” but Bieber actually co-produced the track with Mason “MdL” Levy, a songwriter and producer who’d been in the Bieber orbit since My World. MdL scored his first credit working with Bieber, and he co-wrote and co-produced “Boyfriend,” Bieber’s biggest hit pre-“What Do You Mean?” MdL has also worked with people like Maroon 5 and Maren Morris, but he’s mostly a Justin Bieber guy.
Bieber co-wrote “What Do You Mean?” with MdL and Poo Bear, and he later said that it’s at least partially inspired by his relationship with off-and-on girlfriend Selena Gomez. (Gomez will eventually appear in this column.) Bieber wasn’t exactly articulate when he described the lyrics in a radio interview with Ryan Seacrest: “Girls are often just flip-floppy.” He’s one of those people who expresses himself better through singing than through talking, and the song nails the complexities of human relationships better than anything Bieber could’ve told Seacrest.
Here’s another compliment that doesn’t come off as a compliment: On “What Do You Mean?,” Justin Bieber plays a very convincing dumb guy. He’s trying to process mixed messages from someone, and he has no idea how to do it. He wants to stay together, but he thinks he “can’t win.” This woman wants him around one moment and is completely sick of his bullshit the next, and he can’t keep up. When he asks for clarity, he sounds desperate and pathetic, and he turns those into endearing qualities.
We all know that person, and we’ve probably all been that person. Human beings are all hopeless oafs, reaching out to each other and trying to communicate while constantly misreading situations and making things needlessly worse. There’s a metatextual reading to “What Do You Mean?,” too. Ever since childhood, Bieber has been doing his best to please the public. He keeps fucking up, and people keep getting mad at him. Bieber was never much of a career mastermind. He’s just some kid who got famous too young and who wants to do a good job. He’s bemused at his success and at his failures, and he just wants to know what we all want from him. Maybe it’s a stretch, but that public befuddlement gives the song a little extra juice — an element that’ll come into sharper focus the next time we see Bieber in this column.
The sentiment wouldn’t mean anything if “What Do You Mean?” didn’t work as a song, but it does. The track’s tick-tock beat remains steady and insistent, which adds urgency and makes it stand out right away. Bieber sings that the relationship is running out of time, and maybe there’s some subtext about the ticking clock on his own career. But it’s also quiet and insistent enough to be almost comforting. MdL keeps adding sharp little melodic twists and turns, playful keyboard riffs that veer in and out of the track. It’s not a hammering EDM beat, and the soft delicacy of the trop-house production suits Bieber’s voice much better than any Max Martin oontz-oontz ever could.
Bieber’s vocal is surprisingly sophisticated. He gracefully locks in with the track, and he sounds like he means what he’s saying. I loved “Where Are Ü Now,” but I figured it was a one-off, and “What Do You Mean?” caught me by surprise. It’s clearly the work of Bieber and his collaborators trying to make another “Where Are Ü Now,” but they land much closer to the blueprint than I would’ve thought possible. My initial reaction is preserved in this website’s archives. I was into it. Still am.
Bieber built up to the release of “What Do You Mean?” with a smart social media campaign. In the countdown to the song’s release, Bieber posted a different photo of a different celebrity — Alanis Morissette, Britney Spears, Chris Martin, Carly Rae Jepsen — holding up signs saying how soon the song would arrive. The track came out a couple of days before the 2015 VMAs, and the video debuted right after the broadcast. It’s a pretty dumb video, but it got attention.
Lincoln Lawyer auteur Brad Furman directed the “What Do You Mean?” video, and it opens with Justin Bieber and John Leguizamo together on a rainy streetcorner, making a shady but opaque deal for a stack of cash. Leguizamo, in between American Ultra and the Ice Age short Cosmic Scrat-tastrophe, is made up to look all scary, with a big spider tattoo on his hand. The next thing we know, Bieber is having a possibly illicit rendezvous with this video’s generically beautiful love interest — in this case, Xenia Deli, a Moldovan-born model with at least a passing resemblance to Selena Gomez.
After Bieber and Deli hook up, masked goons break into their hotel room, kidnapping them and tying them up. The couple escape, and their only way out is to jump off a roof. They land on a giant inflatable crashpad, and it turns out that Bieber has paid off Leguizamo to stage the whole thing — the dumbest possible variation on a Fincher plot twist, even if the opening didn’t telegraph everything that was about to happen. Then there’s a big party with a skate ramp and some fireworks, and the girl is apparently delighted by the romance of it all, not furious that she’s been terrorized all night for a prank that was ripped off from a movie. The whole time, Bieber looks ridiculously handsome. Say this for the guy: Plenty of people age out of their teen idol years awkwardly, and that was never a problem for Bieber. Throughout his various dirtbag-adjacent stages, he’s never lost his looks.
Once again, a new Justin Bieber single didn’t catch on at radio — not immediately, anyway. But the masterfully executed rollout for “What Do You Mean?” meant that a lack of radio support didn’t matter. With iTunes sales and streams, “What Do You Mean?” debuted at #1 and interrupted the reign of the Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face.” (For a good chunk of that fall, the Weeknd, Drake, and Bieber held the top three spots on the Hot 100 — a moment of total dominance for pop music’s sensitive-Ontario-fuckboy contingent.)
“What Do You Mean?” only held the top spot for a week, but the song hung around the upper reaches of the Hot 100 for a while, thanks in part to a remix with fellow Scooter Braun client Ariana Grande, someone who will be in this column a bunch of times. The single eventually went platinum eight times over, and it set up the most successful stage of Bieber’s career.
Justin Bieber’s album Purpose came out in November 2015, on the same day that next-generation teen idols One Direction released their farewell album Made In The AM. The release-date battle was apparently a big deal in certain corners of the internet. Beliebers and Directioners, I have learned, do not get along with one another. I’m staying out of that one. (One Direction’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit, 2013’s “Best Song Ever,” peaked at #2. It’s a 6. A couple of One Direction members will eventually appear in this column.) Bieber’s record handily won that showdown, racking up the best first-week numbers of any album since Taylor Swift’s 1989 a year earlier. Bieber had more hits on deck, too. We’ll see him in this column again soon.
GRADE: 8/10
BONUS BEATS: During a 2015 Toronto show, Halsey covered “What Do You Mean?” and mashed it up with the Weeknd’s “Often,” getting screamy, delighted singalongs for both. Here’s the fan footage:
(“Often” peaked at #59. Halsey will eventually appear in this column.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s Chvrches doing a bouncy, bleepy, generally very nice version of “What Do You Mean?” in a 2015 visit to the BBC Live Lounge:
(Chvrches don’t have any Hot 100 hits on their own, but they guested on Marshmello’s 2019 track “Here With Me,” which peaked at #31.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Ohhhh, I really wanna know, what do you read? This, hopefully. Buy it here.
