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It's Lonely at the Top, Eh

At my day job, it fell upon to read Maclean's, Canada's weekly national news magazine. Talk about the ultimate dying format of journalism.

But I digress. Why I'm mentioning this is that one of the articles was a peppy profile of teen idol Justin Bieber, who's a Canadian-born teen idol.

Bieber came off as a nice kid in the article -- as aware as a 16-year old can be that there's something fundamentally absurd about his situation in life. There's always been a bubblegum boy or boys stirring preteen girls to frenzy in U.S. popular culture, ever since Frank Sinatra was knocking them dead at the Paramount, and Bieber, bless him, did not once attempt to portray himself as an artiste, just as a guy with a good voice and an even better gig.

But life's not perfect, and despite fame, fortune, being friends with the First Family, and like that, Bieber IS a Canadian, and he was speaking to a Canadian magazine, so he let his hair down to confess to the bitter disruption popular stardom has wrought on his existence.

Bieber can't play hockey anymore!!!! He's too busy. Actually of course, way too many people have way too much money tied up in Bieber's teeth to allow him to see the inside of a rink for anything more dangerous than a "Disney on Ice Christmas Special." But it's clear Bieber would trade at least one sold-out concert for a shift in a rec league somewhere.

Wait, Bieber's agony gets worse. In a comment both unintentionally hilarious and sad, with which the author had the wit to close the article, Bieber stated that to compensate for the lack of hockey on tour, he spends his free time playing the EA NHL All-Star video game.

"But," says the hero of a billion 11-year olds, "there's nobody else in the tour who knows how, so I have to play it by myself."

So if you read in the trades that Justin Bieber will tour with Nickelback in 2011, now you know the rest of the story.

posted by Michael Gee @ 6:07 AM