Then and now: Has Bieber's bubble burst?

JUSTIN Bieber's bubble has burst. His bruising encounter with the paparazzi this week is one that will be, fairly or not, replayed again and again, like Britney's trip to the salon. Because that picture - surly, angry, almost snarling and having to be calmed by his girlfriend - shows us something we haven't seen before. And there’s a reason we haven't. The singer has a whole army of minders and publicists whose sole job is to prevent such images leaking into the world. His persona on stage and on TV is carefully managed. His encounters with the press, with fans, with real people are military operations – with subterfuge, bribery, threats and stonewalling the weapons of choice. Bieber Inc. is a multi-million-dollar concern and its reputation is everything. His management knows that child stars are a different bundle from your run-of-the-mill pop stars, like One Direction. Part of their attraction is their purity - a commodity that doesn't always survive the transition to adulthood, when sex and alcohol are suddenly on the table. And for every Belieber who wants their idol to stay pure, there are thousands more people out there who want him to wallow in their mud. Think how much the world desperately wanted Mariah Yeater's fictional bathroom fumble with Bieber to be true. The singer's reputation didn't take too much of a hit from the paternity suit - mostly because Yeater's claims were so clearly untrue - and his PR managers were able to obliquely address whether Bieber was sexually active with a nudge and a wink (they weren't so successful at spinning his anti-abortion comments in Rolling Stone, though). To get an idea of just how bizarre life is at the court of King Bieber here is an incident from novelist Drew Magary's revealing GQ interview with the singer: "I was escorted into the studio, where Kuk Harrell, Bieber's vocal producer, was working on Believe without him. After a few minutes, I noticed that someone had drawn a bunch of d..ks all over the grease board by the door. So I pointed at them and asked, "Hey, who drew all the d..ks?" One of the sound engineers immediately jumped up, ran over, and erased them with his sleeve. This is the new and mature Bieber. We can't have d..ks being drawn all over the place. People might get the wrong idea about filthy-rich 18-year-old pop stars. "There is no way around it: Justin Bieber is a very small human being. He's 18, but he could easily pass for someone six years younger. I suddenly realise that I can't box this guy. It doesn't matter, because Bieber says he forgot his boxing equipment. We head into his studio, where (Bieber's stylist Ryan) Aldred greets Bieber and pumps him up for the evening by ripping the sleeves off of his T-shirt while he's still wearing it. OUTTA MY WAY, SLEEVES. This is clearly not the first time they've performed this ritual. It's Bieber's patented entrance move, his talcum powder tossed in the air. Being Justin Bieber means having an endless number of T-shirts to destroy." Magary's interview covers just a few hours in Bieber's life but it is potent. The star is surrounded by business managers, producers and heavy security; the adults around him - and they are all adults - all laugh at his jokes and hang on his every word. The telling quote is from Harrell. When he's asked if Bieber ever needs to be pushed during recordings, if the singer's feelings are ever hurt the answer is: "He hurts feelings." The Bieber profiled fluctuates from a moody, mopey teen, reluctant to talk and offering nothing but "horrible silences", to an over-excited and easily distracted show-off who craves attention, blasts music 9000 decibels and tries to talk gangsta - "Platinum can suck a d..k, man. West Coast all day."; "GOOD NIGHT, B..CHES!". But Magary also gives us a lonely, isolated kid who "exists inside what amounts to a series of interconnected skyways: He goes from his secluded house to his secluded Range Rover to his secluded studio, rarely setting foot in the exposed world." This Bieber, he says, is a caged animal, and knows it. "Bieber is legitimately talented," Magary writes. "He has something to offer the world. He wants to be a real artist. He wants respect. But the way his life is built around him is going to make that very difficult. There's too much riding on his 'brand' for him to get dinged and knocked around and punched in the face, to suffer — and to bounce back from — the kind of traumas that make a child into an adult." Bieber's alleged attack on a photographer outside a movie theatre is what happens when the fragile bubble gets punched. A short walk to a mini-van with your girlfriend while the minders have their eyes elsewhere is all it takes for unscrupulous paparazzi, who know that a picture of Bieber and Gomez together is worth tens of thousands of dollars. Provoked or not, Bieber doesn't come out of the encounter well. He looks like a rabid dog in the pics, threatening but also cowardly (and the video footage Bieber hanging tough with Mike Tyson just days before the incident, all smiles while he feebly pummels the bags, do nothing but reinforce that description). The photographer's claims that Bieber bruised his ribs don't need to be true, nor do witness reports that Bieber and Gomez allegedly fled the scene before the police arrived; the damage to Bieber's persona has been done. It's extremely unfair because Bieber is just a kid, expected to handle pressures that would cripple most people. But as Britney knows all too well, there's no going back. Bieber's seclusion from the real world makes more encounters like last weekend's all the more likely. And always in the background, humming dangerously away, is a warning: remember Jacko. Read Magary’s full interview here, and click here for the extras that didn’t make the final cut.