It was only a matter of time before tween heartthrob Justin Bieber did a guest voice for The Simpsons. And now the inevitable has become reality, and the show’s producers are surely confident it’ll give them a huge ratings boost. It didn’t work last time with Lady Gaga – just the opposite, in fact – but, dog gone it, they’re nothing if not persistent.
The Biebster tweeted the news himself earlier this evening. Here’s his Tweet, embedded below…
Oh, wait. I can’t embed it, because the Tweet no longer exists. It definitely did exist at some point, as it was retweeted over 7,000 times. You can see it for yourself if you head on over to Favstar.fm, a Twitter web app favored by some that lets you see exactly how many people retweeted your Tweets, and has the nifty unpublicized feature of preserving certain deleted Tweets (such as this one) and vanished accounts.
So what happened to the original Tweet? The most logical answer is that Bieber – or whoever actually runs his account – deleted it. Who knows why. Maybe it was some sort of joke that got out of hand? Maybe some Simpsons people ordered him to take it down (Does The Simpsons actually have the power to exert control over the most famous pop star in the world’s Twitter account? Must investigate further.). Maybe it got retweeted so many times that it completely crashed Twitter’s servers, forcing the system to delete the Tweet and throw it into some sort of virtual netherworld?
Or, most likely, Bieber deleted it out of shame.
Look, he’s a busy guy and all, but surely the fact the show has gotten really bad hasn’t escaped his notice. Minutes, or hours after his Tweet, it dawned on him that a hip guy like him doing a guest voice on the very unhip current incarnation of The Simpsons isn’t something to brag about, but rather something to be highly ashamed of. And so, he naively tried to hide the evidence. He hit the delete button, hoping the news would die down and it would deemed as yet another hoax when anyone came looking for proof. In the back of the mind, he contemplated driving back to the recording studio, using his clout and charm to convince Matt Groening to destroy the audio of his appearance, scrap the episode, and pretend the whole thing never happened… but, as Congressman Anthony Weiner learned, deleting a Tweet won’t stop anything. It’s too late. It’s out there. You can’t run from The Simpsons.
[Favstar]