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Today, 16 year-old pop singer Justin Bieber announced his first world tour. This merited an 81-word write up in the Times . Meanwhile, 12 year-old girls are literally weeping with anticipation. What the hell is going on? Come, elderly reader. Learn. Bad news, Old Person: No matter how much you try to avoid it, you will have to eventually interact with someone to whom Justin Bieber is the sun around which their little life revolves. So we present this Justin Bieber Guide for Old People to help you avoid embarrassment in front of your offspring, students, or patrons your candy shop. Justin Bieber is the first “YouTube Sensation” to make it big Back in the old days, pop stars like Lady Gaga came up the hard way: After years of performing thankless gigs in small clubs they would eventually be signed to Island Def Jam Records. But Justin Bieber was signed to Island Def Jam Records just because a YouTube video of 12 year-old Bieber covering Ne-Yo in a singing competition went viral. A prominent manager randomly stumbled on it and now he’s chilling with Usher. Bieber is in fact the first real YouTube sensation to cross over to the mainstream, and much of his appeal comes from this grassroots creation myth. (No, Susan Boyle doesn’t count since the only people who enjoy her sincerely are you Old People.) Justin Bieber is Canadian In the grand tradition of such Old People favorites as Alanis Morissette and Rush, Justin Bieber hails from Canada. He was raised in low-income housing by a very Christian single mom in Stratford, Ontario (Pop. 3,000). Now he lives in Atlanta, which you may remember from the time they Seceded from the Union during the Civil War. Justin Bieber Owns Twitter Perhaps you have experienced the phenomenon of logging into Twitter to see what brands of wine your friends are drinking only to be confused by the fact that “Justin Bieber” is a trending topic. He almost always is, for no reason except that every eleven year-old girl on Twitter appears to only tweet about Justin Bieber . (And everyone else is tweeting “Who the hell is Justin Bieber?”) Bieber has more than a million followers and, according to Perez Hilton, he gains 11,000 new followers daily . Justin Bieber Has Famous Friends Even You May Have Heard of You might know Ludacris best for the hoes he has in so many different area codes. But a new generation knows Ludacris only as Justin Bieber’s friendly rapping sidekick on the summer hit “Baby”. ( “She had me going crazy, oh I was star-struck/she woke me up daily, don’t need no Starbucks.” ) And Usher, who signed Bieber after hearing him sing just once, said of Bieber, “Sometimes he’s like a little brother or a son to me.” Bieber’s toured with Taylor Swift, and sung the opening line on the new “We Are the World” remake that is probably on your “Chillaxing” iTunes playlist. Justin Bieber Has Three Songs Every Prepubescent Girl Knows Bieber’s first album, My World was released in November of last year. It went platinum. But all you need to know are the three hit songs and their corresponding music videos: “One Time” – The one where Usher calls Justin on his iPhone. “Baby (Ft. Ludacris)” – The one with Justin and Ludacris in a bowling alley. “One Less Lonely Girl” – The one at the laundromat. Justin Bieber Literally Causes Riots Among Said Prepubescent Girls You are old enough to remember the 1965 Watts riots, right? Bieber had one of those! Last November, during a scheduled appearance at a Long Island mall, a riot broke out among the 3,000 attendees when Bieber wasn’t allowed to perform because of safety concerns. A handful of fans suffered minor injuries and an Island-Def Jam VP was arrested for not tweeting that the show was off. Yes, Old People, it’s time to wake up to our scary new world where a YouTube sensation has supplanted social justice as the only reason anyone riots, and you can be arrested for not tweeting. Welcome.

Read more here:
The Justin Bieber Guide for Old People [Fieldguide]