A year on from the time Orlando Bloom punched him in the face outside Cipriani in Ibiza, Justin Bieber’s turned from pop brat into a pretty good electro-soul singer who we probably wouldn’t really mind sharing a lift with. If we had to.
As in, we’d no longer take the stairs to avoid him. And considering we’re saying that about someone who pissed into a restaurant cleaner’s mop and bucket before yelling ‘fuck Bill Clinton’, that sure is progress.
Here are the biggest steps Justin’s taken to winning us over this past year:
1. Pleading guilty to the whole drag racing thing
He admitted to the drag racing thing he’d been arrested for in January of 2014, meaning that he’d finally, officially acknowledged that there’s a line and he crossed it.
**2. Having some blond ambition?
**
You know how people will cut their hair right after a break-up? It looked as if Justin was departing his old image with a brand new bleach job. But we waited with bated breath – would he now go the Eminem way, or just, you know, the Rhydian way?
3. THAT Calvin Klein shoot
Eerily pre-dating Lara Stone’s split from David Walliams, (though for legal reasons, obviously there's nothing going on between Justin and Lara, or else why'd he look so sad in the images), the Calvin Klein shoot between Justin and Lara, widely believed to have been photoshopped to give Justin extra bulges in all the right places, got everyone wondering if he might be as good as he looks. And also, why he looked so sad.
4. Apologising
In a whispered mea culpa, Justin explained to his fans he now didn’t know how to act when he wasn’t being a dick: ‘I didn’t wanna come off arrogant or conceited, basically how I’ve been acting the past year, year and a half.
‘And I’m not who I was pretending to be. Often we pretend to be something we’re not as a cover up of what we’re truly feeling inside, and there was a lot of feelings going on in there.’
5. Lolling at himself
6. Being not so bad at his Comedy Central Roast
Everyone else took the piss out of him and they were so sexist and homophobic and racist they made him look alright.
7. Releasing a really great song
Where R U Now, produced by Jack U (that’s a team of EDM superheroes Skrillex and Diplo) is actually really good, and Justin now says his new album is going to sound a lot like this, thanks to Skrillex’s production of some of its songs. While Skrillex can be divisive, there’s no denying his popularity and it’s a certain step up for Justin.
8. Doing a bloody Rubik's cube
Just when we were warming to him, he kind of won us over with his appearance on James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke. But what was the part of it that got us? Not the singing along to his own songs (nor Boyz II Men’s End Of The Road), nor the looking pretty good in a polo shirt. No, what really won us over, is the fact he can do a Rubik’s cube in under a couple of minutes. See, all that childhood of dicking around wasn’t wasted!
We're not saying he's tremendous - after all, he did try to teach Amandla Stenberg what to think about race. BUT...apart from this, he's sure tried to go up in our estimation, hasn't he?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.