What Does 4Chan Think of Justin Bieber Producing EDM?

4Chan's got a pretty bad rep when it comes to just about anything. For example, recently the site drew attention after releasing a load of celebrity nudes. They've also been in the internet bad books this year for pretty much being sexist as fuck.

Having been a reader of 4Chan back in highschool, I was keen to see how they felt about Justin Bieber producing EDM, and what they generally thought of the scene at the moment. Why? A key tenet of 4Chan has always been a hatred of all things commercial, including the EDM scene. And naturally Bieber (a guy who pisses in buckets, and spits on his fans) has also attracted their ire. As you'd imagine, it was not the most enlightening conversation I've been a part of. Here are some of our favourite responses (please note this question was asked a number of times on both 4Chan's /mu/ and /b/ boards):

The difficulty with starting a thread on 4Chan has always been keeping people on topic. On a site which back in the day was no stranger to a child pornography thread, it only takes one person to change the conversation slightly and suddenly your thread has turned into racist rants, or death pics. I asked the question, "What do you think this says about electronic dance music as a genre, now that Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber are starting to make electronic based music?" And for a second, It looked like they were going to play ball.

It was better than nothing, and apart from these answers being painfully obvious, it was looking like the thread was moving towards some kind of intelligent conversation. Then of course as expected, the conversation shifted to Taylor's body.

Of course racism also came up. Something about replacing everyone and everything with Avicii drops and skrillex whines. I temporarily fell asleep.
Apart from discovering a whole Tumblr site devoted to Taylor Swift's ass, the conversation didn't seem to be going anywhere. I decided to try and get the thread back on track and asked. "Considering Disco moved into House, House moved into Deep House and so forth, what do you think is the future of Electronic Dance Music?"

/mu/ has always been a board which is less involved with mainstream music and more interested in non-commercial or alternative artists, so I didn't expect much when it came to the topic of Bieber. But considering /b/'s involvement with Bieber in the past through fake twitter hashtags, I thought that maybe the maybe the topic would pick up a bit more traction. How wrong I was.

Asking 4Chan anything had proved to be the most annoying experience of my life so far. I literally sat in a club for 24 hours sober and still didn't have as shit a time as this.

4Chan is meant to be a website where those with alternative viewpoints and opinions can go and share their thoughts on whatever, and do it anonymously. It's their right and I think it should exist, but 4Chan is essentially the comments section of a website—just without all the other things that give websites a reason to exist.

Did I learn anything? Yes: that no matter whether the discussion is interesting or engaging, it always ends up turning into racist bullshit or a lesson in objectification. I'm not sure if it's because I was 14 when I loved it, or because like most alternative things 4Chan has been gentrified somewhere between my exit and my recent return, but coming back wasn't the same.

Reuben Fidock is taking all future enquiries to the State Library, but you can also reach him on twitter.