In 2010 swept fringe exponent and all-round cherub Justin Bieber crashed into the top of the Billboard album chart with My World 2.0. Not only did it set him on course for future breakdowns and roasting, it also made him the youngest solo male star to top the chart since Stevie Wonder in 1963. Well, step back Bieber because there’s a new fresh-faced Canadian with no obvious egg-throwing tendencies in town in the shape of 16-year-old Shawn Mendes, whose debut album Handwritten has landed at the top spot this week, shifting 119,000 copies, making him the youngest person in five years to do so.
While Bieber made his name by singing along to other people’s songs on YouTube, Mendes has taken it one social media step further by becoming what Billboard called “Music’s First Vine Star”. You see, while everyone else was making dodgy animations, editing their journeys to work for posterity or using it to film that video of Jesy from Little Mix’s admittedly hilarious impression of a Jamaican, Mendes realised he could use it to upload his cover versions. All six seconds of them. Chatting to Billboard last year, he remembered how it all started in the summer of 2013. “I was sitting in my bedroom and my sister came in and I said, ‘Hey, can you record this?’” He then belted out the chorus to Justin Bieber’s As Long As You Love Me (clearly already aware of how to get some online traction) and by the morning the clip had 10,000 likes. Like Bieber he’d started out covering songs on YouTube, but put off by how cluttered it is with kids butchering Adele songs in their bedrooms via wonky webcams, he figured Vine was a better outlet. By October of that year he had 200,000 followers, had played an impromptu gig to thousands of fans in Toronto, performed at the Dallas edition of Magcon (a massive travelling tour for social-media celebrities) and caught the ear of manager Andrew Gertler. Meanwhile his Vine cover game was so strong that there are 10-minute compilations (Shawn Mendes Singing Vines Compilation) of his best bits.
Things really took off when he won perma-smiling DJ and smug ambassador Ryan Seacrest’s Best Cover Song contest in April 2014 (for a brooding retelling of A Great Big World’s Say Something Say Something – Shawn Mendes (Cover)), while his social media numbers (basically the most important stats in pop these days) were deemed good enough for Ed Sheeran to meet up with him in LA for a chat. In fact, Sheeran’s a good reference for the music found on Handwritten, specifically the songs he’s written for fellow social media overlords One Direction. The first single from Handwritten, Life of the Party (which, deep breath, made him the youngest artist to debut in the top 25 with a debut song on the Billboard Hot 100), is the sort of self-empowerment anthem that’s instantly meme-able, lyrics like “we don’t have to be ordinary, make your best mistakes” the sort that could crop up on Instagram written in Comic Sans over a picture of a sun-dappled beach.
The perfect intersection between the old music industry (Mendes is signed to Island Records) and the new, Mendes represents what can happen when you build a fan base from scratch, utilising your main asset; yourself. Like Taylor Swift (who is taking Mendes on tour with her later this year), Mendes interacts directly with his fan base, allowing them the chance to feel part of his success. In fact, Handwritten was moved forward by two weeks as a reward for the fans who’d tweeted so furiously about the premiere of the Life of the Party video it was mentioned over two million times. With a decent enough voice and a look that’s a bit “Glee heartthrob”, Mendes isn’t exactly pushing the pop envelope. What he is doing, however, is showing how just about anyone with a mobile phone and a Vine account can become a chart-topping success. It’s time to start practising your six-second cover of Someone Like You.
