What do Justin Bieber and Frank Sinatra have in common? If you're a music snob, you're likely to say not much, given that Bieber's way around a microphone, from his soft boyish voice to his lack of sexy panache, falls far short of the master.
What they do share is age-old teen idolatry, the screaming fans and crush of crowds at concerts, the huge record sales and magazine covers and drooling press and the millions of posters that are stuck to the bedroom walls of every prepubescent girl in North America
Bieber at 16 is sweet-faced and adorable, all iconic mop top and funky gear, while Sinatra wasn't much to look at when he first began performing as a teen in the 1930s. He was scrawny, awkward and jug-eared, but he had that voice and that special something that very few entertainers, even today, can claim, much less sustain, over a lifetime.
And that may well be what Bieber and Sinatra don't have in common: staying power. Sinatra invented the teen idol genre and managed to do what so many others have since failed to do: He turned his super stardom -- and, make no mistake, Bieber fever has nothing on Sinatra's early bobby-soxer fame, matched perhaps only by Elvis Presley mania -- into a lucrative multi-faceted career, so influential an entertainment powerhouse that even years after his death at the age of 82 in 1998 he is still top of the pops.
Sinatra's fame came the old-fashioned way -- through the radio and, later, television and the movies -- while Bieber is of a generation of the truly overnight sensation, a byproduct of social media, of the fingertip fan club where a single text can ignite a career.
The Ontario-born sensation, a self-taught musician, was "discovered" two years ago after his mother Pattie posted a YouTube video of him singing Ne-Yo's "So Sick." An American music manager saw it, invited him to Atlanta to meet R&B star Usher and the rest is teenybopper history.
That's how it's done these days, of course. There is little paying of dues, or playing of seedy joints in hick towns on the road to Madison Square Garden. There isn't even much call for talent, this being the age of flash and dash, where it's all about getting attention and cashing in while the getting's good because pop stardom is seldom sustainable.
Just ask Aaron Carter and Tiffany and Shaun Cassidy and Mandy Moore and Debbie Gibson and Hilary Duff, Menudo and New Kids on the Block, and the countless other one-time pop singing supernovas. Even Miley Cyrus, Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears, sensations all, have only survived through smart marketing that has extended their brand far beyond the recording studio.
Bieber is certainly exploiting his time in the sun -- touring, recording, appearing on CSI, reportedly hosting a new incarnation of Punk'd, tweeting with Kanye West, collaborating with rapper Ludacris, performing for Barack Obama, hanging out with Kim Kardashian, publishing an autobiography, launching a line of nail polish and burning up the viral video world, along with Lady Gaga, that other Internet invention, who is racing Bieber to a record one billion YouTube views.
Will Bieber last? The bigger question, perhaps, is whether Bieber fans will stick around, like they did for Sinatra and Ricky Nelson and Paul Anka and, of late, Mickey Mouse Club survivor Justin Timberlake, who has watched Disney peers like Lindsay Lohan and Christina Aguilera struggle to stay on top. Sinatra was of a time when stardom was somewhat more organic, while Bieber's fame, and thus his fate, seems compressed and out of his control, a Cole's Notes of how to become rich and famous and, yes, fade away in the blink of a download.
The teenage girl who is today screeching over Bieber's "Baby" -- and the other Bieber hits that have been breaking Billboard chart records -- has an astonishingly abbreviated attention span, having been born to the expendable coffee klatsch that is the 'Net, nurtured by the 140-character tweet and slavish to the vacuity of Facebook, a modern generation programmed by technology and social media to expect, even demand, that nothing lasts forever.
Bieber's fans are fireflies who can't find a place to land, who don't want to land, and as popular as he is, he is only the next big thing until the next big thing comes along.
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