Is manager Scooter Braun encouraging sexual violence between his clients?

Tue, 28/08/2012 - 07:27 by Tim Chipping We've spent the morning reading an incredibly long but fascinating interview with Scooter Braun, the ridiculously named college dropout who discovered Justin Bieber and is now managing terrible UK boy group The Wanted. Buried in the first few thousand words of The New Yorker's expose is an inexplicably strange and disturbing incident in which the manager appears to encourage the band to punch his multi millionaire protégé in the gonads. We can't wait for this to come out in court in a few years time...

As you'd hope, there are several nuggets of astonishingness in the interview, not least what Braun informed Bieber, at the start of their professional relationship:

"When he was thirteen, I said, 'If you stop singing, if you never dance again, if you never play again, I'm going to be in your life.' "

We don't think it was meant to be the sinister threat it comes across as in print. Or was it?
The magazine also documents a strained and troubling encounter between his young ward and the band who aren't as successful as One Direction, The Wanted, before an interview with Carson Daly:

"Bored, Bieber started a game, playfully jabbing everyone in the crotch with his fist. First, he jabbed at Braun, who, without looking up from the script, dropped his hands to block. Daly did the same. When Bieber jabbed at Siva Kaneswaran, a member of the Wanted, he connected. He called out, 'Got you, bro.' Kaneswaran balled his fist but seemed unsure how to respond. 'I don't want to hurt his pretty face,' he said.

Braun said, 'Just get him in the pretty balls. It's fair game.'

'No, it's not,' Bieber said.

Braun took a firm tone. 'Justin, it is - fair game,' he said. 'You hit him in the balls, fair game.'

Bieber was peeved. 'Where're we going?' he asked. 'Where's my dressing room?'"

We really don't know what to make of that. Bieber refers to his relationship with Braun as being "like a close uncle."  Hmm. We've all had one of those uncles.

Perhaps more revealing is the cold hard business deal the pair have between them, in which Justin receives a whopping cut of the profits from any new Scooter-signed act, in return for pretending he's their best friend:

"When Braun signed Carly Rae Jepsen, he gave Bieber a fifty-per-cent cut. Braun told him, 'We'll be partners. But you're going to do your part, being a loudspeaker: put her on your tour, sing a song with her.' And Bieber obeyed. The homemade video of him horsing around to Jepsen's Call Me Maybe got forty-eight million views and made the song catch fire. Last month, he tweeted to introduce the world to Braun's newest client, Madison Beer, a thirteen-year-old singer who resembles a baby Megan Fox. Within minutes, her name was trending worldwide."

So that's what pop music's like now. Great.

Read the full interview here.

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