The Number Ones: Justin Bieber’s “Sorry”

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

For a few years there, Justin Bieber really was an obnoxious little fuck. That’s not entirely his fault. Bieber was a child star, and we’ve seen again and again that child stardom doesn’t necessarily lead to healthy adulthood. Teen heartthrob types like Bieber seem to have an especially hard time avoiding the pitfalls of obnoxious little fuckdom. It’s an occupational hazard. These kids are fearsomely beloved within a certain segment of the population, and they are widely detested within a larger segment, regardless of what they do. If this was your life, you might be an obnoxious little fuck, too.

In his awkward transition to adulthood, Justin Bieber showed very little indication that he was trying to shed his obnoxious-little-fuck image. As the first wave of Bieber’s pop stardom ebbed away, we got used to a steady string of stories about him doing obnoxious little things. There was, for instance, the story of Mally, the 14-month-old capuchin monkey that Bieber might’ve acquired on the black market. (Bieber said Mally was a birthday present from a friend.) German authorities seized Mally after Bieber tried to bring the monkey into the country on a private plane without documentation or vaccination records. Bieber said he was going to get the paperwork in order and then come back for the monkey, and he never did. Mally ended up living at a Copenhagen zoo.

Stories like that were all too common, and they got endless press coverage. For the vast majority of Americans who were not in Bieber’s target audience, hating the kid became a national pastime. There were no stakes in talking shit about Justin Bieber. It was the easiest thing in the world. Anytime his name came up, you could just performatively roll your eyes, or you could write a social-media post about performatively rolling your eyes. It was kind of fun.

Justin Bieber might still be an obnoxious little fuck now, but he’s gotten better about keeping it private if he has. The thing about pop stardom is that you can generate PR disaster after PR disaster and still be one hit away from the redemption narrative and the triumphant comeback. Bieber’s return to grace is one of the most impressive pop-star pivots in recent memory. He didn’t just come back with one hit. He came back with many hits, and the best of them was probably the song that he actually called “Sorry.”

“Sorry” came with plausible deniability built in. At least on paper, “Sorry” is a song about a girl, and Bieber sometimes insisted that that’s all it was. His tempestuous relationship with Selena Gomez, someone who will eventually appear in this column, was public enough that you could easily read that narrative into the track if you wanted. But “Sorry” also felt like a soft, tremulous apology to the world at large, and the track worked well enough on a musical level that the apology actually landed. That’s how you play the meta-pop game.

It took a team of true pop professionals to put “Sorry” together. The most obviously notable of those professionals is Skrillex, the star EDM producer with the funny haircut. Bieber’s redemption story really started with the release of “Where Are Ü Now.” Skrillex and fellow superstar DJ Diplo formed a short-lived duo called Jack Ü, and “Where Are Ü Now” was the biggest and best song from their only album. The song anticipated the slinky tropical house boom of summer 2015, and Bieber crushed his tender, agile vocal peformance. “Where Are Ü Now” became a surprising pop hit and an even more surprising critical sensation, and it went all the way to #8 on the Hot 100. (It’s a 10.) When Bieber followed that single with his Purpose album, he used “Where Are Ü Now” as a starting point, and he kept working with both Skrillex and Diplo.

Sonny “Skrillex” Moore, the adopted son of a Scientologist couple, grew up around California. When he was 18, he became the singer for the Georgia metalcore band From First To Last. This was 2004, the moment when Warped Tour metalcore was becoming a pretty big deal, and From First To Last signed to Epitaph and developed an audience pretty quickly. Moore had an impressive scream and a whole lot of onstage energy; I once watched him scramble up a side-stage scaffold at a New Jersey emo festival. But Moore started to get vocal problems — not surprising, considering how he used his voice — and he left the band after just a few years. He then became a rave DJ, which was a surprising career turn.

Sonny Moore started going to raves around the same time that he started going to hardcore shows, and he always talked about how much he loved Aphex Twin. When he started making his own tracks, he’d hand out CD-Rs of his music at From First To Last shows. In 2008, he started calling himself Skrillex, and his first EP came out two years later. Once again, Moore’s timing was good. The dance subgenre known as dubstep started out as drizzly, evocative left-of-center UK head music, but it exploded in popularity when it became populist big-room turn-up fare, characterized by its big buildups to thunderous bass-drops. Within a few years, Skrillex became the public face of that stuff. In 2010, his track “Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites” became his first Hot 100 hit, peaking at #69.

Plenty of the same people who made a big show of hating Justin Bieber also made a big show of hating Skrillex. Once again, it was easy. If you were into first-wave dubstep stuff — Burial, Kode9, early James Blake — you were not happy to see the word used to describe this guy who looked like Corey Feldman with a ridiculous asymmetrical haircut getting rich with his gimmicky bass-drop thing. But the gimmicky bass-drop thing was really fun, especially if you were in a big room with a lot of people. I went to a Skrillex DJ gig at SXSW in 2012, and I had a great time.

In any case, Skrillex didn’t need music-nerd love. He was playing to huge crowds at EDM festivals, and he was landing instrumental dance tracks in the lower reaches of the Hot 100. (As lead artist, Skrillex’s highest-charting single is “Purple Lamborghini,” a Rick Ross collab from the 2016 Suicide Squad soundtrack, which is kind of embarrassing for everyone involved. That one peaked at #33.) But Skrillex couldn’t keep doing the bass-drop thing forever, and the understated thump of “Where Are Ü Now” showed that he was capable of a whole lot more.

When he came in to work in Justin Bieber’s Purpose album, Skrillex enlisted the help of another producer, Michael Tucker, who started out under the stage name Blood Diamonds before wisely changing it to BloodPop. Tucker grew up in Kansas City and went off to study film in Vancouver. There, he DJ’ed parties and became friends with Grimes, then an experimental DIY artist. Grimes appeared on BloodPop’s 2012 track “Phone Sex,” and then he co-produced her 2014 single “Go.” BloodPop carved out a niche in glitchy dance circles and released some stuff on Skrillex’s OWSLA label. At the same time, he found work in the pop world, working on tracks for people like Charli XCX, Tinashe, and Lupe Fiasco. Madonna, someone who’s appeared in this column a ton of times, brought him in to work on a bunch of tracks from her 2015 album Rebel Heart. (BloodPop’s only Hot 100 hit as lead artist is “Friends,” a 2017 Justin Bieber collab that peaked at #20.)

Skrillex wasn’t present at the songwriting session that produced the earliest version of “Sorry.” Neither was Justin Bieber. Instead, it was BloodPop working with the hot-shit songwriting team of Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter. Michaels, born in Iowa but raised outside LA, got an early start in the music business. She was 18 when she co-wrote the theme song to the Disney Channel show Austin & Ally. Over the next couple of years, she landed songwriting credits on records from pop artists like Demi Lovato and Fifth Harmony. When she was 20, she met Justin Tranter, the person who quickly became her songwriting partner.

Justin Tranter, who is 13 years older than Julia Michaels and who uses they/them pronouns, was a musical-theater kid in Illinois who went on to study music at Berklee College. They moved to New York and released a couple of solo albums before becoming the leader of Semi Precious Weapons, a glammy rock band that built up some buzz in the late ’00s. Lady Gaga, who came out of the same NY club world, collaborated with the band and took them on tour, but they never really took off. When Semi Precious Weapons broke up in 2014, Tranter moved to Los Angeles and signed a publishing deal. Right away, they got a songwriting credit on “Centuries,” a pretty ghastly Fall Out Boy song that peaked at #10. (It’s a 3.)

Justin Tranter and Julia Michaels got their first credit together on “Run,” a 2014 single from the former Pussycat Dolls leader Nicole Scherzinger. “Run” wasn’t a hit, but Tranter and Michaels found an easy working rapport, and soon they were working together all the time. In 2015, they worked together on hits from Selena Gomez and Joe Jonas’ band DNCE, as well as Justin Bieber. I guess they didn’t take sides in the Selena/Justin breakup. “Sorry” is supposedly about Selena Gomez, and Tranter and Michaels will appear in this column for co-writing a Selena Gomez song that’s supposedly about Justin Bieber. Tranter and Michaels also co-wrote “Friends,” the Justin Bieber/BloodPop collab mentioned above. Julia Michaels didn’t really have any designs on pop stardom for herself, but her songwriting streak got so hot that she took a pretty good crack at it anyway. In 2017, she made it to #11 with her debut single “Issues,” which she co-wrote with Justin Tranter.

Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter came up with a “Sorry” demo in a late-night songwriting session with BloodPop. BloodPop came up with the beat, and Michaels later told Songwriter Universe, “For some reason, the word ‘sorry’ popped out of my head.” The trio was specifically trying to come up with a Justin Bieber track, and Michaels tells Genius, “I was like ‘OK, I don’t really know Justin, but I know that he’s a very emotional person. It feels like he connects to things that are more emotional, which I felt like I could tap into.'” She had an ex who came to her door to apologize months after the breakup, and that feeling stuck in her head. Maybe the writers weren’t thinking about the grand arc of Justin Bieber’s career, but it fit.

Whether intentionally or not, Bieber effectively foreshadowed “Sorry” when he subjected himself to a Comedy Central Roast early in 2015. After sitting there while a bunch of comedians mercilessly torched his ass, Bieber did the regular thing where he gets up and fires back. But Bieber also basically admitted that the comedians were right: “There’s been moments I’m really proud of and a lot of moments I look back and I’m pretty disappointed in myself for… For that, I’m sorry. But what I can say is I’m looking forward to being someone that you guys can all look at and be proud of.” Aw.

That’s not exactly the message of “Sorry,” but it’s close enough. When the track’s demo was done, the writers sent it to Bieber’s representatives, who loved it. Bieber himself changed a few things about the lyrics, and Skrillex reworked the production; both got songwriting credits. In its final form, “Sorry” is constructed as an attempt to repair a broken relationship. Bieber never mentions the specifics, but he does get pretty verbose. His flexible, downcast voice just tumbles over the beat as he admits his faults: “I know you know that I made those mistakes maybe once or twice/ And by ‘once or twice,’ I mean maybe a couple of hundred times.” He implies that the rift might not be entirely his fault: “You know that there is no innocent one in this game for two.” (That line fits with most romantic disputes and also with whatever was happening with Bieber and the public.) The chorus is mostly just Bieber moaning the word “sorry” again and again, but he hits a real plaintive note when he asks if it’s too late now.

If “Sorry” was a saccharine ballad, it would be insufferable. But the track works because it slides right into the graceful, dance-adjacent lane of Bieber’s previous hits “What Did Ü Go” and “What Do You Mean?” Skrillex and BloodPop chop up a woman’s wordless moan and then launch into a genteel, restrained take on the dembow riddim, the clomping drum pattern that’s powered virtually every reggaeton track since the genre’s inception. (When Colombian superstar J Balvin appeared on the song’s Latino remix, it foreshadowed both the rise of reggaeton on the American charts — Balvin will eventually appear in this column — and the things that would happen when Bieber tried singing in Spanish.) Bieber also puts plenty of dancehall inflections into his delivery. There is a Skrillex drop on “Sorry,” but it’s about the smoothest, least disruptive drop imaginable. The track uses the tension-and-release dynamics of club music, but it glides right through them with glossy efficiency.

So many tiny hooks wind their way through “Sorry.” Every time the drums drop out and return, they bring a tiny serotonin rush. The muted trumpet blasts, the soft pianos, the bloomping sub-bass, the little sampled yelps and whoops — they all arrive with clockwork precision. More importantly, “Sorry” brings out the best of Justin Bieber. He’s got enough swagger to navigate a slick-ass backing track, but he also sounds wounded and lost and remorseful, like a little kid who realizes that he’s fucked up. The structure of “Sorry” isn’t exactly impeccable — I wish it had a bridge — but it accomplishes the goal of making Justin Bieber sound sympathetic. That didn’t exactly look like the easiest task in 2015.

Like “What Do You Mean?,” “Sorry” came with an masterful promo campaign. Bieber posted clips of the song online before releasing it, the way stars do with TikTok now. There was an Instagram video of Bieber, Skrillex, and BloodPop in the studio, dancing around and riding hoverboards while the track played. (This was the peak hoverboard era.) The song never got a traditional music video, which probably helped endear it to people who were sick of looking at Bieber’s face. Instead, the main video is a clip of two all-woman New Zealand dance crews, ReQuest and the Royal Family, doing an elaborate routine to “Sorry” against a plain white background.

ReQuest founder Parris Goebel directed and choreographed the “Sorry” dance video, and she appears as one of the lead dancers. All of the dancers in the “Sorry” video are great, and every agile little move highlights the intricacy of the song’s production. This was a trick that could only work once; pop stars couldn’t just outsource their videos to dance crews and hope for a “Sorry”-sized impact. This one time, however, it absolutely clicked, and it turned Goebel into a minor celebrity.

The big rollout for “Sorry” hit an unexpected snag when Adele released her gargantuan smash “Hello” on the same day that the single came out. (As a few other critics have pointed out, “Hello” is an apology song, too. Apology songs were so hot in late 2015.) Adele kept “Sorry” from debuting at #1, as “What Do You Mean?” had done. But unlike “What Do You Mean?,” “Sorry” didn’t immediately slip down the charts. For months, Adele held the top spot, while “Sorry” hung around the chart’s upper reaches. For eight of the 10 weeks that “Hello” occupied the top spot, “Sorry” bided its time at #2. Then, finally, Bieber’s charm offensive won out, and “Sorry” got a few weeks at #1.

The one bit of controversy that came out of “Sorry” didn’t even really have anything to do with Justin Bieber. In 2014, the one-woman indie rock project White Hinterland released “Ring The Bell,” a song that opened with a vocal riff that sure sounded like the chopped-up voice that runs all through “Sorry.” White Hinterland’s Casey Daniel sued Bieber and his collaborators for sampling her song without permission, and it seemed plausible that Skrillex and BloodPop, two producers with hipsterish tendencies, could’ve sampled a White Hinterland track. In response, Skrillex posted a video of himself manipulating Julia Michaels’ voice on the original “Sorry” demo. Daniel dropped the lawsuit in 2017.

SORRY but we didnt steal this 🙏🏻 @justinbieber @bloodpop pic.twitter.com/9897j9sfY7

— Skrillex (@Skrillex) May 27, 2016

Justin Bieber released his Purpose album a few weeks after “Sorry,” and it moved about 650,000 album-equivalent units in its first week. (In the streaming era, we have to talk about “album-equivalent units,” though more than half a million of those Purpose sales were actual sales.) The week after the LP’s release, Bieber had 17 songs in the Hot 100, a record at the time. Eventually, he landed three tracks in the top five at once. “Sorry” hung around for months, racking up a grand total of 21 weeks in the top 10. It got tons of play on pop, adult contempo, and Spanish radio stations, and it cracked the R&B airplay chart.

By any measure, “Sorry” was a colossal hit, one of the biggest of Bieber’s career. The single was certified diamond in 2021, and its dance video is creeping up on four billion views. At the end of 2016, Billboard named it the year’s #2 single. The public-redemption narrative implied on “Sorry” has given the track a weird legacy — both an an expertly crafted pop song and as a platonic-ideal damage-control PR move. It sure seems like “Sorry,” more than any other song, changed the trajectory of Bieber’s career.

Bieber himself has always been a little conflicted about how people received “Sorry.” When he was promoting the song, Bieber told an Australian radio station that “Sorry” was, in his mind, the end of his time as a pariah: “There needs to come a time when they just say, ‘We get it,’ and putting out a song saying ‘I’m sorry’ kind of puts the icing on the cake. I’m ready to just move on.” Around the same time, though, Bieber told GQ, “People ran with that — that I was, like, apologizing with the song and stuff. It really had nothing to do with that… It was about a girl.”

In retrospect, the best thing about “Sorry” isn’t its role in Bieber’s narrative it’s the way the song bubbles so effortlessly. “Sorry” could’ve easily been pure treacle. The conventional-wisdom thing to do would’ve been to make it a teary acoustic ballad. But that version of “Sorry” would’ve been terrible, and it would’ve done Bieber no favors. Instead, Bieber delivered his apology through the medium of balletic, limber dance-pop, and that made all the difference. As it happens, Bieber did have an acoustic ballad on deck, but he wasn’t apologizing to anyone with that song. Instead, he used that style to communicate something considerably more bitter. We’ll get to that one next week.

GRADE: 8/10

BONUS BEATS: In 2015, Morgan Wallen had already competed on The Voice and released an EP, but you couldn’t really say that he was famous yet. That would come later, and so would the public apologies. But here’s Wallen getting some practice by covering “Sorry” in what appears to be a hotel room shortly after the song’s release:

(Morgan Wallen will eventually appear in this column. Ironically enough, Bieber later apologized for endorsing Wallen, but I guess that’s a subplot for another day.)

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the 1975, no strangers to public apologies, doing a jazz-inflected “Sorry” cover in a 2016 visit to the BBC Live Lounge:

(The 1975’s highest-charting Hot 100 single, 2014’s “Chocolate,” peaked at #80.)

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the pretty-great stripped-down version of “Sorry” that the indie country singer Lydia Loveless released in 2017:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Ariana Grande, who apologized for licking that donut that one time, headlined Coachella in 2019. During one of her sets, she coaxed out Justin Bieber, who hadn’t been onstage in a few years, to sing an apparently-impromptu version of “Sorry.” Here’s the fan footage:

(Ariana Grande will appear in this column a bunch of times, including once for a Justin Bieber duet.)

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: I just googled “Kelly Clarkson apologizes,” and the top results were all about Clarkson saying she was sorry for getting choked up while watching Céline Dion sing at the Olympic opening ceremony. Fuck that shit! That was charming! Clarkson should get emotional whenever she wants. Here’s Clarkson singing “Sorry” on a 2020 episode of her talk show:

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Buy it here. If you haven’t, I’m missing more than just your money.