Nearly 20 years on, the videos look like grainy real-life footage from the seconds before a dream comes true. A Canadian boy in his early teens named Justin Bieber, his fringe flicked like a perfect heartthrob-in-training, wanders a bedroom sporting Bart Simpson and Tupac posters, singing Chris Brown’s “With You”. Now here he is idling nervously at a microphone in a school hall, clad in a shirt and tie, awaiting the first notes of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” from a CD player. Or busking with a guitar on the steps of his local train station in Stratford, Ontario – trying to raise money for a trip to Disney World – as loiterers chatter or chow down on sandwiches along to his cherubic soul warbles.
The accompanying notes from his mother Pattie Mallette, too, sound so politely hopeful in their ambition to use the new possibilities of the internet to turn her son into a star. “Justin made it to the final three in the local singing competition,” reads one; “Justin singing ‘Cry Me a River’ by Justin Timberlake,” reads another, with the helpful clarification, “Justin Bieber (sounds like Beeber).” The irony simply squeals out of the screen that these train station loungers and pushy talent show parents – even the then 13-year-old artist himself – have no idea that Bieber would soon become a phenomenon; the world’s first YouTube pop sensation and global teen superstar, boasting professional relationships with Usher, Frank Ocean and Ludacris and a 4 million-selling US Number One debut album My World 2.0, released 15 years ago last month.
