Could the same be said about popular music, and the moments it freezes in time? All those narratives of love won and lost, of the ravages of time and capital just a pretext for telling the truth about the furniture of the performers’ time? And while Balzac might have been surrounded by 18th century interior opulence, we live in sparser, starker, Scandinavian-and-self-assembled times now. For most of us, our furniture is not all that much to write—or sing—home about. So we turn to our objects, gadgets and technologies—arguably the furniture of contemporary life. Is this to say that all of Justin Bieber’s oeuvre—“ ”—is about the alienation of the iGeneration, and that dissonant moment when you realise you’re cradling three iProducts at once? I think it might well be. (via who will play my gameboy when i’m gone? | THE STATE)