Toward whom is “Sorry” an apology? According to Justin Bieber, the song is a post-mortem plea for reconciliation with his former girlfriend, Selena Gomez. But there is plenty of reason to believe it was directed toward the world at large. The pop phenom and OG YouTube superstar spent his transition into adulthood mired in bizarre, boorish behavior that earned him felony charges and threatened to puncture his clean, teen-dream image, and by the time “Sorry” dropped in October 2015, that image badly needed rehabilitation. Luckily for Bieber, the track proved an enormous success, not just because of its aesthetic trendiness but because of its universally relatable message — a message that recast the singer as a man willing to acknowledge the many mistakes of his past.
Before Bieber ascended to universal fame, he was merely the only child of an Ontario woman named Pattie Mallette. Mallette’s memoir Nowhere But Up documents a life haunted by sexual abuse and childhood traumas: an aspirant young performer whose own dreams of stardom were crushed by her parents, she turned to hard drugs before becoming a born-again Christian, and gave birth to Justin in 1994 when she and her husband Jeremy Bieber were still teenagers. After the couple split, Mallette raised the child on her own, with the help of her extended family.
Bieber’s prodigious talent for music revealed itself early. At the age of 12, he competed in his first talent competition, placing second with a cover of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick.” Mallette filmed his performance and, to share it with friends and family, uploaded the footage to a new video-sharing site called YouTube. When the video started receiving attention, she started filming and uploading his subsequent performances, which quickly racked up millions of plays. As Bieber’s ubiquity on the site grew, Mallette prayed devoutly to her Christian god for her son to experience an artistic career — preferably one related to her faith.
Her prayers would soon be answered, but not by a Christian man. Scott Samuel “Scooter” Braun, an Atlanta-based artist manager and former executive of Def Jam Records, discovered one of Bieber’s videos and quickly traced them back to the source. As Braun met with Malette and expressed his intention to manage Bieber, she initially blanched at his Jewish heritage, but counsel from her church and family softened her perspective. With her permission, Braun signed Bieber to his Raymond Braun Media Group, where he, along with co-owner (and 2000s R&B megastar) Usher, whetted the unrefined teenager into an adept, precocious performing machine. Usher mentored the impressionable Bieber while assigning him a “swagger coach” to influence his apparel choices and mannerisms toward the day’s trends; Braun, meanwhile, acted as booking manager and de facto father figure, demonstrating the ingenious managerial methods that later kickstarted the careers of his proteges Carly Rae Jepsen and Ariana Grande.
By the end of 2010, 16-year-old Bieber was a pop sensation. His debut record, My World 2.0, dominated the U.S. charts, and in May 2011, its lead single, “Baby,” toppled Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” as the most-watched video on YouTube, whose userbase had grown exponentially since his first upload in 2007. Bieber’s relentless touring and television appearances turned him into one of North America’s top pop exports by traditional industry standards, and when he released Never Say Never, a 3D concert-cum-biopic detailing his 2010 tour, it smashed global box office records. At the same time, Bieber had become the most-searched celebrity on the web, and his brand accounted for roughly 3 percent of all Twitter activity, demonstrating how his deft command of the internet separated him from his male pop peers (including Usher himself).
Yet what also set Bieber apart from the competition was his disproportionate, similarly-loud crowd of detractors, who made “Baby” also the most disliked video on YouTube. The bedrock of their criticism was presuppositions not only about Bieber’s agency as an artist (especially given his youth), but about the legitimacy of his sudden stardom. Bieber’s rapid ubiquity felt to many like a major industry calculation; these people were not paying attention to YouTube, still only five years old at the time, and did not understand how Braun savvily capitalized on the site’s prevalence among teens and pre-teens to build an army of grass-roots Bieber evangelists well before the industry flexed its promotional muscle.
Bieber bashers would soon find far more to criticize during the promotional cycle for his 2012 album Believe. Not only was burnout settling in — the Saturday Night Live episode he hosted in February 2013 was lambasted by critics for its laser focus on his fame — but as the year progressed, Bieber found himself facing (and often causing) one PR nightmare after another. Tabloids and news outlets feverishly documented these incidents, ranging from the innocuous (wearing a gas mask in public and vomiting on stage) to the bizarre (abandoning his pet monkey in Germany and cursing former U.S. President Bill Clinton while urinating into a bucket) to the criminal (vandalizing a neighbor’s house and allegedly assaulting his bodyguard). After Bieber was arrested in January 2014 for driving under the influence, more than 270,000 Americans signed a petition calling for his deportation back to Canada.
With Bieber’s image as a teen heartthrob fast eroding, efforts were made to maturate him into an act with more mainstream appeal, and the seeds of “Sorry” were planted in this soil. After spending 2014 largely dormant, Bieber reappeared, repenting for his transgressions in multiple interviews. Comedy Central’s Roast of Justin Bieber, which premiered in March 2015, formed the schadenfreude-laced centerpiece of this apology tour: at its conclusion, Bieber was allowed a crucial moment at the podium to reflect on his past mistakes. At the same time, a feature on 2015’s “Where Are Ü Now,” a song by Diplo/Skrillex collaboration Jack Ü, reintroduced the 21-year-old Bieber as an adult performer willing to dabble in sounds outside the singer-songwriter teen pop he was known for. The song’s ascendancy on the charts also gave Skrillex, a DJ most notable for headlining EDM festivals, his first hit, and he and Bieber started collaborating in earnest, leading to the singer’s next album, Purpose.
“Sorry” was composed largely by Michael Tucker, known at the time as BLOOD (and later as BloodPop). After Skrillex constructed a “3-on-2” dancehall beat akin to dembow, he contracted Tucker (who previously contributed to Grimes’ entry into mainstream pop, “Go”) to put together a melody befitting the beat. Tucker responded with a melody similar in flavor to the tropical house of “Where Are Ü Now?” The crux of the song is a call-and-response chorus around a melismatic vocal sample — what Tucker claims represents “the people or situations in which Justin or the listener could be apologetic towards” — followed by Bieber’s titular concession.
With the music drafted, songwriters Justin Tranter and Julia Michaels were brought in to craft the “Sorry” lyrics. The title comes from Michaels’ personal life; she’d experienced a breakup a few months prior. “For some reason, the word ‘sorry’ popped out of my head,” she explained in a 2015 interview. “We were in a booth, and Tranter and I just hashed it out from there.” The pair constructed a song about the moment in a relationship’s lifespan when one party regrets their actions and pleads for forgiveness. “Everyone can relate to fucking up and asking for mercy,” Michaels said. With “Sorry” nearly complete, the track was sent to Bieber, who finalized the song and recorded vocals.
While it’s debatable whether “Sorry” is literally about the quest for romantic absolution, what’s less ambiguous is how seamlessly it advanced Bieber’s image rehabilitation. By the time of the single’s release, America at large demanded an apology from Bieber for betraying his clean-cut, Christian-leaning provenance; at the same time, Bieber — like all child stars — required a smooth transition into adulthood, a transition his team had failed to navigate with the R&B-laced Journals, released in early 2013. “Sorry” did more than anything that came before to posit him as a more mature individual: while its narrative is familiarly steeped in the mechanics of romance — and the sultry sway of its beat adds a more mature sexual undertone than his earlier teen pop — the confluence of its rhythm and melody, on a surface level, ties the song to the mid-2010s trend of “tropical house,” which grafted the aesthetic of Caribbean dancehall pop (itself already popularized in the U.S. by artists like Rihanna and Drake) to electronic productions. Bieber’s musical output in 2015 (including his feature on “Where Are Ü Now” and on fellow Purpose cut “What Do You Mean?”) borrowed heavily from this trend, and the effect worked twofold: dancehall’s explicitly libidinous energy helped recast Bieber as an adult sex icon, while simultaneously aligning him with the pop zeitgeist.
Curiously, but not surprisingly, the shift seemed to happen outside of Bieber’s input. It’s unclear to what extent he personalized the lyrics for “Sorry” after its completion, but fans commonly posit that Bieber directed the song toward another onetime teen idol, actress and singer Selena Gomez, with whom he had a years-long, off-and-on romantic relationship. Bieber seemed to confirm the “Sorry”/Gomez connection during a November 2015 interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, but his words aren’t wholly convincing: when DeGeneres brings up the topic, Bieber appears physically uncomfortable, and when the host asks him which songs on Purpose are dedicated to Gomez, she brings up the track and lets him weakly confirm it. Aside from that “admission,” Bieber hasn’t ever directly linked the song to Gomez, instead offering in a 2016 GQ cover story (featuring a sharp-dressed, masculine Bieber) that the song is definitively “about a girl” — words further discounting the idea that “Sorry” was meant to be a public apology.
Co-writer Tranter, on the other hand, opened up about the song’s intentions in a 2017 interview with CBS. “Sometimes you can use what is happening in pop culture to affect a song,” he said. “Being aware of how pop culture was viewing [Bieber] in that moment, I knew an apology would be good.” Tranter, who had never met Bieber but had a close working relationship with Gomez, also admitted in the interview that he warned her about the song’s release —- not that it was about her, but that people would likely interpret “Sorry” as directed toward her, which would impact her career. “These are real people with real lives,” Tranter stated.
Bieber’s displacement from his own image revitalization is reinforced on the official “Sorry” music video, wherein the singer — the original King of YouTube — isn’t featured at all. Instead, two New Zealand dance crews, directed by Parris Goebel, perform a choreographed routine against a stark white background. It’s as simple as music videos get, but that simplicity paid enormous dividends: despite Bieber’s onscreen absence, the video exploded on YouTube and helped the song chart at number two upon its release before it finally dethroned Adele’s “Hello” and spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. By December 2017, “Sorry” became the fifth video to rack up a billion YouTube views, and it remains one the most-watched videos in the platform’s history.
By industry metrics, “Sorry” and Purpose not only succeeded in bringing Bieber back from the void but also in rebranding him as an adult pop star, one assumedly past his days of outward petulance. Whether or not that transition represented true personal growth or a machination of one of the greatest marketing teams in musical history is another question entirely. Perhaps this question is irrelevant; regarding a person like Bieber, who spent his impressionable years drilled on how to be a celebrity, it’s impossible to determine whether the sentiment of “Sorry” truly comes from the heart. But the sincerity of Bieber’s message ultimately matters less than why he acted so outlandishly in the first place.
“It’s because of the way the ‘Justin Bieber brand’ was portrayed,” Bieber said in a 2015 NME cover story. “I was a wholesome pop star who was so amazing who had nice hair and a fucking image that no one could ever live up to. People see the glam and the amazing stuff, but they don’t know the other side. This life can rip you apart. I was like, ‘Dude, I didn’t sign up for this.’ It’s like, “‘Can you guys just leave me alone, I just wanna make the music. Please leave me alone.’”
Sorry (KORD-0044)
