Tha Carter VI. Jaws: The Revenge. Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College. Vultures 2. The cultural landscape is littered with unnecessary sequels, so it is not exactly an effrontery that Justin Bieber has released a follow-up to his alt-leaning SWAG less than two months later, but wow, is it a chore to get through. On SWAG II, redundancy is twofold: It tacks on another 23 tracks to the senior SWAG’s already overlong 21, resulting in over two hours of music between the two volumes and very little to say. The novelty has worn off.
Appealing as it was to hear Bieber adopt the beguiling sonic-stew aesthetic of his collaborators Dijon (who’s back to co-produce six SWAG II tracks) and Mk.gee (who, as last time, lends his services to just one), it is now clear that Bieber’s take is lite-r in every way. It’s less robust, less intense, less blissfully chaotic. The elements are there—the R&B-inflected singing (though Bieber’s comes out more like R&B-affected), guitars so bleary they sound hungover from last night, lite-rock keyboards, little wild squiggle fills—but the dynamism has been flattened, perhaps by other collaborators (Carter Lang, Dylan “Sir Dylan” Wiggins, and Eddie Benjamin are again behind the boards for the majority of SWAG II). Minor distinctions speak volumes as Bieber’s secondhand sound circles back to the gel-slicked textures of its original source material. Try playing “Open Up Your Heart” alongside Breathe’s 1988 soft-focus adult contemporary smash “How Can I Fall?”; they flow together so well that Bieber is effectively making music that one could peacefully buy adult diapers to.
On its face, SWAG II is fine in small doses. It is not as ignorable as it is interesting, as Brian Eno said about ambient music, but it is pleasantly ignorable. Scrutiny, though, reveals the majority of these songs to be single-sentiment affairs, and many play as sketches. Some have only one verse; “Poppin’ My Shit” features only Bieber on the chorus while Hurricane Chris raps a few bars, concluding with the fawning, “Once I hit, you gon’ get hooked and ain’t gon’ never leave me/Got some friends and they all love Justin Bieber.” What is this, a cabinet meeting?
There are odes, perhaps directed to wife Hailey Bieber, though the treacliest, “I Think You’re Special” casts its message of inner peace more generally. It also squanders the presence of Tems, who is almost relegated to background vocals. There are sexual slow jams, probably also about Hailey Bieber. “You got me singing, I, I, oh man,” is some faint praise Bieber offers in one. There are songs about arguments, and in the most scabrous, “Petting Zoo,” Bieber seethes amid a solo-electric arrangement: “I told you that you fuckin’ with a man/Yeah, I told you I don’t play that shit, no cap/Bitch, I told you I’m not doin’ tit-for-tat, no/Don’t make me say some shit I can’t take back.” At least there’s something courageous in being willing to sound like a total prick in public. Even when he’s being affectionate, there’s sometimes an edge. “Nobody gets to touch you/I do,” he sings, hardly the most romantic definition of monogamy.
The album’s lyrical shortcomings are vast—Bieber’s words try about as hard as his dancing. They include inscrutable metaphor (“Turn me out, when you get in, I get behind it like I’m Spider-Man” in “Better Man”), greeting-card sentiment (“My smile, her grace/Both of our heart/Oh, child, everyday/You’re the best part” in “Mother in You”), and water-treading repetition (“Trust me, this feeling is a good one and a nice thing,” also in “Better Man”). Bieber seems to fundamentally misunderstand what it means to “look right through” someone when he sings, “I saw a reflection in you/When you looked right through me like you really knew me.” “Eye candy, eye candy/’Cause you taste so sweet, uh/When you’re looking at me, uh,” he sings over an Addison Rae-type pop break, but since when has eye candy looked at you? And just try to stifle a groan when he declares, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I’ma hold you, baby.” Perhaps Bieber delights in turning figures of speech on their ears, as he did when he told paparazzi, “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business,” which was immortalized in a skit on the first SWAG and is back again on the vague haters kiss-off that opens SWAG II, “Speed Demon” (“Say you missed me, wasn’t missing, is it clocking to you?”). Maybe this will become his catchphrase, his very own “Did I do that?”
R&B, or music that aspires to it, need not be lyrically complex to resonate. Interpretation is massively important within the soul tradition; it can breathe real life into the prosaic and clichéd. The issue here is that Bieber isn’t a soul singer, but someone who performs as one. Put another way: He doesn’t do soul, he does vibes. Sure, he has a sweet falsetto and a sultry tone when his singing is sober. His phrasing is nimble to the point of taking on a flow at times, and there is MJ-reverent gusto in his gasps and grunts and interjections. But when he strains for emphasis, as he often does, it comes out in a whine and sounds exactly like the voice of someone who would say in reference to Chris Brown, “You my goat.” That both of these singers tend to whine for emotional effect suggests something about how early fame can arrest one’s development.
Nothing about Bieber’s artistry is more distinctive than the fact of his presence in it, and the entire SWAG project is mostly notable because Bieber, whose roots are in bubblegum, is doing something that, in its purer form, is edgy. But again and again, SWAG II’s weirdest bits—the rolling snares in “Moving Fast” that sound maybe Homogenic-inspired, the breakbeat softcore backdrop of “Safe Space”—get turned down and blended into the wider musical palette so that they don’t even come off as distinct. The album is cohesive to a fault, until it’s not. Sticking out like a nail through a wrist is the closer “Story of God,” a nearly eight-minute spoken-word retelling of the Book of Genesis from Adam’s perspective. You know, in case you were wondering what it would be like if Justin Bieber were the first man on Earth.
