Music

Santa's Comin', Girl: Why Justin Bieber's Christmas album is the craziest thing you'll hear this season

by Tyler Munro

All you need to know about Justin Bieber’s Mistletoe Christmas album is that it’s fucking insane. On the 8^th track, an adaptation of Christmas traditional “Little Drummer Boy,” Bieber trades rhymes with Busta Rhymes and somehow comes off as the crazy one. Though Busta steals the show with his rapid-fire gibberish, Bieber steals the show with this little diddy: “playing for the king, playing for the title, I’m surprised you didn’t hear this in the bible.”

And then there’s the much publicized duet with Mariah Carey, a cover of her infamously popular “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” and a rendition that sees the 17 year old singer trading swoons with a MILF that’s actually older than his mother (by six whole years!). And yes, it’s creepy, and yes, Mariah Carey hits that note—you know, the one that sounds like someone trying to vacuum up an entire litter of cats—and yes, we’re fucking stoked all of this is happening. Because, honestly, the holidays are about having fun. They’re about the Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics. They’re about “Oi! To the World,” the Vandals version, though, and not the shitty No Doubt (from A Very Special Christmas 3). Holiday albums aren’t about white noise: they’re about drinking too much eggnog, wrapping last minute presents the night before and laughing hazily and drunkenly with your families or friends or children or whatever, and Mistletoe is perfect for that. Just probably not for the right reasons.

Sure, Bieber’s a hell of a lot more sober on Mistletoe than Scott Weiland sounds on The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, but calling him lucid is a stretch. The fact of the matter is, this is some of the creepiest, craziest Christmas music you’ll hear this season, no small stretch with x-mas cuts from weirdos like Mike Patton and John Zorn kicking around. First, these songs are absolutely surreal: aside from Bieber and Busta, there’s the gigantic Jackson 5-esque funk breakdowns of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” the aforementioned Mariah duet (and another, equally creepy duet with the Band Perry, a nu-country trio consisting of some chick and her gay brothers or something). On “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” J-Biebz takes three whole seconds to sing the word “fire”. The word has one single syllable, yet it takes him almost a second to sing each letter. Think about that for a minute; three minutes if you’re Justin Bieber.

We’re told Bieber can sing, and evidence suggests that’s the truth, but he doesn’t just sound processed on Mistletoe: at times he sounds like an actual computer. “Silent Night” opens with a voice that sounds less like a human and more like someone leaning on their keyboard: noisy beeps that sort of sound like notes if you listen long enough. About a minute and a half in the vocal runs kick in, but no amount of note-pinching pantomime can save such a dull song from, well, being dull. That’s why the collaborations on Mistletoe are so worthwhile: they save Bieber from hair-flipping too far up his own ass. The faster the song, the better it is to spin. Boyz II Men harmonize the shit out of “Fa La La,” pulling in their best Christmas cameos since that time they kicked a cut on the Fresh Prince way back when. On that note, imagine how fucking cool a Tatyana Ali guest spot would be on this? She wouldn’t even have to do much. Or Will Smith? Jaden Smith? Better yet, Willow Smith? The possibilities are endless: why can’t we whip our hair this Christmas? Is it because we did it last year, Justin? We’ll leave you guys to ponder the possibilities.

Oh, and that story about Justin’s balls dropping? Totally true. When he’s not computerized to all hell, he sounds, dare I say, like he might be growing up.