Emote, J-Dog, emote!!!
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[5.29]
Edward Okulicz: The skin he inhabited so well on “Boyfriend” is either evidence of a fluke, or a particular skill-set that doesn’t quite apply to this. Michael Jackson was barely less than half his age when he sang the far more emotional and frisky “I Want You Back,” and that worked; this doesn’t, because maybe Bieber knows enough about love to know that the central metaphor of love as life-and-death is silly. And yet, his dully emotionless delivery of this is twice as silly as the idea itself.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Finger snaps and a smooth voice, and a self-loathing no one (including Bieber) believes for a second, balance against an erotic martyrdom that would have sounded fresh somewhere around the Shangri-Las.
[4]
Brad Shoup: If pop manhood — that old marketplace sleight-of-hand — is the goal, jumping on Michael’s back is a move both canny and confusing. Yeah, Mike made the transition, but not with the Ben LP. I suspect the production committee stitched a lot of Bieber’s takes together, which is fine. He’s got that throwback melisma working, and if he’s not working with the top-grade ersatz-Smokey lyric of the original, he’s more comfortable sliding notes around. But Bieber’s got five years on Mike at this point, and Jackson’s about to blow past his would-be successor’s one-tool skillset. I suspect we’ve found Bieber’s ceiling.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: I’m never not going to rate something with a harpsichord (or fake harpsichord) hook highly. The fact that Bieber’s unleashing not only his pre-79 Michael Jackson, but his pre-69 Colin Blunstone, is icing.
[7]
Alfred Soto: What this sprite and Timberlake share at this point in their careers is an exterior burnished and strengthened by years of variety shows and magazine cover preening, so to hear him admit he’d die in anybody’s arms if “you” touched him is a stretch, especially when the drum track and keyboard wouldn’t have embarrassed LFO in 1999.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Bieber evidently wants to skip being Timberlake here and go straight to Michael Jackson. Fair; so did Timberlake. But the song sags with chintzy instruments, like a Christmas carol commissioned for a mall parade, Bieber’s whinier than Michael was — his timbre on “I can’t help it, I’m just selfish” warrants a breakup — and nobody bothered to conceal the umpteen joins in his vocal takes. “Love on Top” is this track done competently; “Lovefool” is this track written better. So what’s the point?
[1]
Jer Fairall: It already deserves to be Bieber’s claim on immortality on the grounds that he has never before even come close to sounding so in command as a vocalist, so in tune with a song’s unique ebbs and flows, so tailored to a composition’s particular energy and sentiment. Still, what I’m not yet able to untangle is whether or not whatever this hold that “Die In Your Arms” has had over me these last couple of weeks would exist with such fierce strength were I able to hear it as nothing more or less than a glorious pop song (and really, that should be enough), had “Die In Your Arms” not had the strange fortune of gracing a year already so steeped in loss. Certainly, the song carries its own wise and heartfelt sense of history on the back of a reasonably obscure Ben-era Michael Jackson sample, evoking MJ’s haunted and aborted childhood on the cusp of Bieber’s own ascendance into adulthood in a way that cannot help but speak, poignantly and even painfully, to the crushing finality (whether chosen or imposed) of youth at its terminus. It is a song that, no matter how much distance that we will eventually get between it and our current, seemingly endless period of mourning, I suspect may only prove to be listenable in the warmer months of the year because it feels so blissfully and so achingly like summer itself, or maybe (and better still) just the hazy memory of the season as it is felt through the radiance of our favourite records. It is a wholly postmodern text if only in the sense of postmodernism as not simply a crucial part of our contemporary condition but perhaps the only way in which art can currently be crafted and disseminated, a song that cannot be experienced without the weight of its bittersweet legacy hovering tangibly overhead. We’re fortunate to have it.
[10]