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Shawn Mendes: Can the pop sensation be bigger than Bieber?

By Al Horner, 8 June 2018

Shawn Mendes has spent much of the five years since bursting out of Ontario anonymity answering the same question: is he the new Justin Bieber? "Every time someone asks me, I always say: that’s the biggest compliment you could give me," the 19-year-old told Rolling Stone last week, explaining his admiration for his fellow Canadian whose journey to fame echoes his own.

Like Bieber, Mendes built an online empire from his bedroom as a prodigious teen with cherubic good looks and a trembling, tumbling vocal that explodes into life like a confetti cannon. Where Bieber used YouTube to command an audience, Mendes used Vine, the now-defunct six-second video platform, where his micro-covers of the likes of Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and – you guessed it – Justin Bieber earned him a major record label deal within two years of owning his first guitar. Three US chart-topping solo albums that capitalised on his devoted internet fan base later, Mendes is at the brink of genuine pop phenomenon status.

From posting to Vine to performing for Elton

His latest full-length, simply titled Shawn Mendes, shot to number one in the US charts upon release last month having sold 140,000 copies in its first week, the fifth highest first-week sales of the year so far (the record reached third spot in the UK albums chart). Mendes headlines arenas and recently delivered a show-stopping performance at The Biggest Weekend, duetting with James Bay in the process. He also performs at parties for Elton John and earlier this year, lit up the Queen’s 92nd birthday celebrations (chickening out of asking Prince Harry for a last minute wedding invite is "my biggest regret ever," he says).

What I have to do now is be very honest with myself and honest about what I’m talking about
Shawn Mendes

The most important development to Mendes since jumping from six second covers to fully-formed pop anthems of his own though, is likely how the artists he once imitated in bedroom-bound clips are now his peers. He’s toured with Taylor, written songs with Sheeran (Fallin' All In You) and enjoys a mutual respect with Bieber that reached peak weirdness this week when he offered to buy the Sorry singer’s underwear for $500. Hey, when your latest video has been streamed close to 1 billion times in little over a month and when Apple Music have declared your new album the most-streamed pop release of 2018, you probably have that kind of money to burn, right?

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Shawn Mendes and James Bay team up for Mercy

Pop's perfect partnership play Swansea's Main Stage.

A very millennial pop star

What is overlooked about Mendes however, complicating any Bieber comparison, is how new and uniquely millennial a breed of pop star he is. Not necessarily in sound: though he’s graduated from cover songs to his own immaculately constructed anthems, his songs remain respectful homages to the established acts dominating his personal playlists.

"I found that in the gym in the morning I would listen to Kanye West, then on the drive home I’d be listening to John Mayer, then in the evening I’d be listening to top 40 hits," Mendes recently told GQ of the listening habits that helped forge his new album.

The result is a record that proudly parades its influences, from the Justin Timberlake-indebted glide of Lost In Japan to the unabashedly Followill family-inspired pop-rock theatrics of In My Blood. "Kings of Leon were headlining a festival and I was able to go on stage behind them," Mendes recalled recently. "They played Sex On Fire and I was so blown away by the anthemic electric guitars, big drums, the way the crowd reacted... It put me on a high for like two months. I basically ran back to the studio and was like, let’s make a rock anthem."

Instead, it’s in the tiny details of the Canadian’s sumptuously produced, smoothly delivered pop that you notice how uniquely modern Mendes's music is. For a start, his depiction of anxiety and depression on songs like 2015 single Stitches – in which he describes "going under" and questions whether he’ll "make it out alive" – and In My Blood, which includes lines about "walls caving in" and self-medicating through dark episodes with alcohol, are geared towards a generation of pop fans growing up with a greater awareness of mental health than any other generation.

"I found I was closing myself off from everybody, thinking that would help me battle it," Mendes recently told The Sun of his own struggles with anxiety, for which he sought therapy. "What I have to do now is be very honest with myself and honest about what I’m talking about."

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A "post-#MeToo pop hunk"?

There’s also the sexual politics of Mendes’s songs, offering a post-#MeToo spin on the usual ‘maturing pop hunk’ tropes. Boy band-ish pin-ups like Mendes tend to start singing lustily about their sexual encounters by this point in their careers, underlining their maturity by introducing a certain steaminess into their sound and lyric sheets. Coming in the wake of the recent #MeToo movement shining a light on sexual harassment, rape culture and misogyny in society, though, Mendes’s third album is restrained in its sexuality.

Mendes's MO is all respect
Laura Snapes, The Guardian

As The Guardian's Laura Snapes put it in her review of the record: "Mendes’s MO is all respect." It’s true: Mutual, a late-album, mid-tempo slink of echoing acoustic guitars and shuffling beats, alludes to consent: “I want you bad, can you reciprocate?” he asks, swapping out the lusty boasts that have dominated the songs of previous male pop stars in his position for something more chivalrous.

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Boy-next-door for 2018 or "like tofu"?

With close to 60 million followers across his combined social media channels and UK arena shows plotted for 2019, maybe the real question for Mendes isn’t whether or not he can emulate Justin Bieber – but whether or not he can eclipse him.

It might be that arguably Mendes's most appealing factor to his fans – his approachability, that sense that he’s still the normal boy-next-door of his original Vines – could be the thing that keeps him from reaching that next level of pop enormity. His self-titled album, though largely well-received, attracted some criticism for its lack of personality, with The New York Times noting its dearth of lyrics that reveal who Mendes is beyond his respectful romantic encounters: "Like tofu, he adopts the flavor of the songwriters he’s collaborating with… That makes this album feel like a collection of homeless songs for which Mendes is merely a vehicle."

The best of modern pop interacts with our understanding of the artists’ celebrity lives. Justin Bieber's Sorry was a gleaming earworm apology that begged forgiveness of a public who had witnessed him behaving badly in magazines and TMZ videos. Taylor Swift fired back at Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West on Look What You Made Me Do, after their Snapchat run-in in 2017. It might be that Mendes needs to add an autobiographical edge to hit Bieber-level success. If he can do that, to quote one of his biggest singles, there’ll be nothing that can hold him back.

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