In the playground, me and my friends would pretend to be the Spice Girls and practice the dance moves to S club 7’s Reach for the stars. Popular music inspired us to have fun creating dance moves and guided us through those young teenage emotions, in terms of love and all the other crazy things that seem to be the almighty end of the world at the time.
Recently I had been looking over at social sites and noticed teenagers as young as twelve discussing self-harming themselves because of an image they had seen online of the heart-stealing Justin Bieber smoking what seemed to be cannabis. There is a lot of controversy on Twitter and Facebook about this topic; #CutForBieber has been trending on Twitter, @OfficialCANCER responded to this trend tweeting ‘#cutforbieber? Cutting is NOT something to joke about. There are people who are actually suffering from self-harm, this is so disrespectful.’
I found it discouraging to see such negative proceedings as a result of a teen star who may have just been experiencing something that the majority of teenagers do once in their lifetime. I’m sure Bieber wouldn’t have had any intentions of creating such a storm regarding self-harm, but it does make you question how much of an effect celebrities, particularly musicians, have on their audience.