Not entirely sure we’re the intended audience for this.
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[3.67]
Katherine St Asaph: O, Jason Mraz, you’re like a fucking fungus / You are the blight that has now infected Bieb.
[3]
Kat Stevens: This is very sweet! Docked three points for repeatedly saying ‘shorty’ though.
[7]
Anthony Easton: This seems really early for an Xmas single. Really early. Also, I don’t understand why he calls women “shorty.”
[3]
Doug Robertson: First up, that Justin Bieber’s not only doing a Christmas song but doing one where he sings about wanting to be under the mistletoe with a noticeably unspecific “you” is a stroke of marketing genius and one that’s likely to be so financially lucrative that we are finally free of recession, the world’s economy rescued solely by the undiscerning tastes of his target market. And it’s this that leads me on to the second point, which is that it really doesn’t matter what I, or what anyone else here says about it. Of course it’s awful, and of course it’s the sort of saccharine schmaltz that took more time to record than it did to write, but it’s not for us, and slagging him for the triteness of his music is like attacking Barbie for being made of plastic. Bieber is now as much a part of growing up as braces and social awkwardness, and if it gives his fans some joy then good luck to them. It would be nice if he at least tried to reward his fans’ unthinking devotion with even a hint of musical effort just once in his apparently unstoppable career, mind.
[1]
Alfred Soto: Roast your own chestnuts, Jason Derulo. The Canadian pixie whose talent for cross-promotional marketing is as impressive as his lip size makes nice over cod “island” good-times beat. J.C. Chasez would have choked on his frosted tips for Bieber’s voice control. Had I children, I’d put this single in the stocking in lieu of Bieber himself.
[5]
Alex Ostroff: It’s not as though the phrase “Jason Mraz featuring Sleigh Bells” inspires particularly high expectations. As it turns out, “Jason Mraz featuring sleigh bells” merits even lower ones.
[3]
Jer Fairall: For a good many of us, the thought of Justin Bieber + Christmas probably conjures up any number of horrors, but a pastiche of Jason Mraz’ unctuous acoustic wisps was not what I was expecting. Yet, the Beeb’s understated junior Lothario act feels right at home in this kind of inoffensive mush He’s currently our most polite and affable teen pop star, and “Misteltoe” is, accordingly, easygoing and painless.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: It’s hard to shake the idea that, given Bieber’s warm, generous delivery, and the lobotomised, sunny luau feel of this, that maybe this was a bit of fluff gathering dust in Bieber Towers made profitable with a new lyric here and a scrubbed-clean chaste romance video. I love Machiavellian ingenuity, but I hate records that try to cram laid-back down your throat.
[3]
Brad Shoup: I’d assume that recording a Christmas album is a dreadful prospect: the obligation to put a quick-fading stamp on songs that have been recorded thousands of times, the creativity-crushing original songs that tick off the referents (“cheer,” “wise men,” “chestnuts,” “winter [sic] snow”) and sound like the result of a Bruno Mars writing workshop. More likely, though, your Biebers and your Obersts see the task as confirmation — they’ve made it! People want them as background music for about five weeks in winter. Now you have to explain to your aunt what “shorty” means.
[3]