I woke up randomly this morning close to the moment Justin Bieber’s abruptly announced, hours-delayed Swag II became available on YouTube and ended up accidentally listening to the last song first. “The Story of God” is, simply put, the pop star’s Paradise Lost. It’s a nearly eight-minute me-and-my-wife-in-the-Garden-of-Eden spoken-word tale where Justin and Hailey as Adam and Eve betray God after a serpent makes them jealous of His powers. What was once horny abundance — “It’s a feast, right? / Everywhere you look, taste the explosion in your mouth,” Bieber narrates — devolves into chasmic heavenly heartache: “The verdict comes down: the world is broken now because we broke it.” All the while, the gooey ambient synths underfoot lean closer to New Age than gospel music.
Starting with “The Story of God” offered a strangely fitting approach to Swag II. The album actually is sort of like the black-and-pink-houses meme Bieber posted to tease his second album of the summer. July’s Swag rebuffed months of speculation about the artist’s mental well-being with admissions of imperfections and odes to romantic seclusion. Faith and fidelity will fix any nebulous behind-the-scenes turmoil, Swag suggests, before leaving listeners with a church-service benediction in “Forgiveness.” Aesthetically and emotionally, Swag II is dawn chasing darkness away. Adam accidentally sparks the invention of death in the Garden, “The Story of God” notes, but that was “just the beginning.” Bieber, mirroring the work of John Milton, is drawn in by the long redemptive arc. His Book of Genesis sermon follows an acoustic devotional where Bieber sings “hallelujah” to Hailey, their son, and even their two dogs — a 12-minute closing stretch that would get many of his contemporaries laughed off the internet. Chance the Rapper’s reviled wife-guy era caught career-changing smoke for considerably less family-values banter.
Bieber, an artist who seems to love weed and megachurch culture with the same passion and who has long discussed his faith in and out of music, doesn’t scan on record as the demure, denial-of-gratification Christian that rumors of an attachment to a cult imply. He doesn’t quite fit anyone’s description. The man practically bays for his partner like a cartoon wolf, feet planted firmly in the R&B microgenre of waiting-for-someone-to-get-off-work anthems, like Ginuwine’s “So Anxious” and Faith Evans’s “Soon As I Get Home.” Giddy in holy matrimony, Swag II is more seemingly barely filtered work, the kind of album where outsider hip-hop vet Lil B wanders in asking Jesus to show his face (“Safe Space”), just a few songs after “A Bay Bay” rapper Hurricane Chris raises a tequila toast to baddies and peaches from Cali and Atlanta (“Poppin’ My Shit”). The album’s headspace and connections remain almost breathtakingly random: plainclothes church bros, the woolly production aesthetics of guitar wizzes Dijon and mk.gee, stoners, new jack swing, dad rock, and crunk and cloud rap.
We are left no closer to clarity about Bieber’s woes than we were 44 songs ago, but it sure seems like he’s channeling it all into some of the most compelling pop music of this summer, and his career, like everything he’s ever been into, is bubbling in one pot. He’s making the rest of the summer’s Christian-ish pop and country guys — Alex Warren’s weepy “Ordinary,” Benson Boone’s palpable ex-Mormon aura, Morgan Wallen’s periodic pretense of worshipful regret — look deeply drab. If you’re gonna pull from or reckon with Gospel and contemporary Christian music in a pop context, you should sing it like your ass really needs a rescue, not like Marcus Mumford’s fedora became sentient and went solo.
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- Justin Bieber Keeps You Guessing
Swag II blesses us with the pop star’s Paradise Lost.
