Justin Bieber’s “Slowth Spurt”
Berlin-based music writer Philip Sherburne explores Slow Music via Justin Bieber’s U Smile…
August is always a slow news cycle, so it’s somehow fitting that this month’s big viral sensation was about a really slow song.
The song in question is Justin Bieber’s “U Smile,” but you’ve never heard it like this before. Using a free audio application called PaulStretch, a musician named Nick Pittsinger has slowed the tune 800%, stretching the 3:16 tween-pop ditty to over half an hour long. (You can, and should, listen to it here.)
The amazing thing is that this low-budget stunt actually sounds, well, amazing. As many commentators have pointed out, the whale-song melodies and tidal flow sound not unlike the ambient epics of Sigur Ros. An even more apt comparison, if more obscure, would be to the great chamber-rock band Stars of the Lid, on Chicago’s Kranky label.
The slowly shifting chords of the PaulStretched Bieber — the glacial pivot through the classic, reassuring steps of tonic, subdominant, dominant and so forth — sounds uncannily like what Stars of the Lid do, both on record and in performance, with electric guitars, violin and cello.
(In fact, I suspect that the members of Stars of the Lid are somewhere grinding their teeth at this very minute, cursing the fact that it took a 16-year-old mop-topped heartthrob to validate their whole aesthetic on a mass-culture scale — or, worse, render it a joke.)
Of course, it is a joke, and a great one. That it’s funny on so many levels is part of the reason for its insane viral success, which you can calculate by the million-plus listens on SoundCloud, the service hosting the song, as well as by the stories that have popped up everywhere from Gawker to Billboard to The Washington Post.
There’s the basic “WTFOMGLOL” factor, sure. (The repeated reference to “800%” only plays that up — in fact, 800% isn’t that big a difference; it’s just eight times.) It’s a water-cooler-friendly topic, since it’s Justin Bieber: even those of us who have never knowingly heard a Bieber song before — or hadn’t until now, anyway — can share the pop-culture reference.
But the project goes deeper than that. PaulStretched Bieber, as I’ve come to call this accidental artwork, belongs to a long tradition of pop-culture readymades, from Duchamp’s urinal to Warhol’s soup can to Christian Marclay’s Up and Out, a video that combines the soundtrack of Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller Blow Out with the visuals of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. (That’s another artwork, incidentally, that takes its premise from a joke.)
This kind of appropriative approach to media is only accelerating the more we experience culture online, thanks both to the speed that information circulates and the increasing availability of cheap tools that allow us to manipulate digital objects.
Part of what makes PaulStretched Bieber so great is the fact that it was done with freeware. To protest that anyone can do this is missing the point — part of the point, in fact, is that anyone can do this.
Beyond the media aspect, what I find so fascinating about PaulStretched Bieber is how it ties in with a number of musical trends that stress deceleration. We’ve had Texas’ “chopped & screwed” hip-hop for years, of course — exaggeratedly slowed-down rap music meant to simulate (or complement) the narcotic effects of cough syrup.
Recently, hipster acts like Salem have fused elements of that style with goth and coldwave overtones to create a genre they call “drag,” whose name and sound alike speak to a kind of terminal sluggishness. Just this month, Montreal’s CFCF put his own spin on the concept with a free mixtape, “Slow R&B for Locations Canada-Wide,” that pitches down contemporary R&B as though it were a 7-inch single spun on one of those vintage turntables that goes all the way down to 16 rpm.
Experimental music has been all over that tactic for years: the British artist Philip Jeck makes his electro-acoustic collages by playing vintage LPs on multiple turntables set to 16 rpm and then manipulating the woozy rumble like so much molasses.
And if you’re primarily impressed by PaulStretched Bieber’s 36-minute running time, consider John Cage’s “As Slow As Possible,” an organ performance in Halberstadt, Germany, that began in 2001 and is slated to have a duration of 639 years, ending in 2640.
It’s not just music where slowness is taking hold; the Slow Food movement has spun off similar initiatives in many fields, including Slow Travel, Slow Parenting and even Slow Money.
It’s hard not to see all of these things as reactions to the widespread perception that culture is accelerating at an uncomfortable, possibly unhealthy pace. (I was going to say unsustainable, but Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity devotees would probably argue otherwise.)
And maybe that’s ultimately the most powerful thing about PaulStretched Bieber: the way it takes not only a symbol of pop culture at its most ephemeral, but also a barely adolescent kid in the flush of youth, and makes them seem both sublime and somehow eternal.
With a bit of free software and an Internet connection, Nick Pittsinger has turned Justin Bieber into a kind of cryogenic child, 16 going on Rip Van Winkle, in a way that brings out the mortal in all of us.
This article originally appeared on Rhapsody on the 24th August, 2010. You can read more of Philip’s always-fascinating musical musings here.
