About Bera, with a sore head

I'm not entirely sure that, when asked why you make music, the reply "I was born into the business" is one you want to hear from a sixteen year-old. Really? It's not that you're driven, or love music, you've just gone into the family business?

It seems a plausible explanation for Bera, though, who at the age of 16 talks about making music like his mummy was a press pack and his papa was a Rolling Stone. Well, not a Rolling Stone, more, perhaps a Tigerbeat:

“I’ve been in this business since my childhood, and I’ve been trying to get as much information as I could from every relationship. Even though some of my projects didn’t work out, they still gave me a lot of experience,” says Bera. “As you know, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ right?”

As you know.

He's sixteen, and already dead-eyed-talking about "trying to get as much information" from "relationships".

“I have a really cool relationship with [label Georgian Dream], we’re friends before anything. I respect them a lot and they respect me for who I am. They know what I can do and what I can’t and I know it too. I’m not trying to do Michael Jackson, Usher or Chris Brown… My first role on stage is to be natural and sincere,” says Bera.

No, he really is a person. This might sound like the sort of thing you'd expect a computer-generated J-Pop star to have had programmed into their 'interview response' file, but Bera is flesh and blood.

He's asked about longevity:

“It all depends on the consumers, on my fans. I’m thankful for what I have today, for what I get from them and I’ll be grateful forever,” says Bera. “Even if everything ends tomorrow, I will know that we made it, because people already gave me so much love and emotions.”

Yes, he really does describe the people who like his music as "the consumers".

Did I mention he was sixteen? Normally with teen stars, you worry that the music industry bullshit will swallow them whole and spit them out. With Bera, it's the reverse: he appears to have swallowed the bullshit and is now doing the spitting out.

An Open Letter To My Teenage Self

For some reason - we can't assume it's purely to come off as a smug, self-satisfied git - Fergie has sent a letter to her 17 year-old self. Typical of the bloody Post Office, though, it's only just turned up.

Oh, hang on.

"Sure, you'll be a giant flirt and wear sexy clothes, but you'll never take it to an unhealthy level and act on it." Fergie also warns herself about the rough patches ahead in her life, including her drug addiction and debt problems - but adds,"Don't worry. You'll always come back to your roots."

Fergie's 17 year-old self has replied with a text message trying to clarify what, exactly, she means by "acting on sexy clothes to an unhealthy level" and pointing out that if she'd included some useful information - like who wins the 2002 Kentucky Derby - she could have avoided the debt problems altogether. A second text attempted to clarify if "I'm, like, always this embarrassing in the future?"