We ruined Justin Bieber: Full of apologies and scared of controversy, Bieber makes an unforgivably bland comeback

An average day for Justin Bieber, according to his cover story in Billboard magazine, may end with his “sneaking down from his room to the hotel lounge to play the piano while people drink.” The suggestion is that Biebs is so devoted to his art, he’ll make it for its own sake. As Bieber drops his new album “Purpose,” he’s on the verge of completing a perfect 2015 pop comeback. Most musical returns to the public eye have been about proving continued artistic relevance and making strong statements – from LL Cool J’s “Don’t Call It a Comeback” to “It’s Britney, Bitch.” Missy Elliott does both on her brand-new “WTF ”: “Got a new idea, let me switch it / Man, I’m so futuristic.” But if she’s continually looking ahead, Bieber, whose adolescent mishaps — from Anne Frank gaffes to a trail of forgotten exotic pets — went disastrously viral, is now perfectly attuned to our social media-driven present: His new music is engineered to offend precisely no one. Bieber’s delivery on “Purpose” is meek – androgynous without the sass of a David Bowie or an Annie Lennox – and the production, some of it by former dubstep bad-boy Skrillex, is airy and vaguely international; you’d expect to hear these songs on credit-card commercials or on an airplane’s PA system before takeoff. In “Purpose” he has found an ideal response to what Jon Ronson, in his book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” sees as a “conformist, conservative age,” created by an atmosphere described to him by a journalist friend: “I suddenly feel with social media like I’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment.” Bieber has learned his lesson.