Justin Bieber has a giant chip on his perpetually shirtless shoulder. He isn't doing much press for his new Believe Acoustic album, but he did sit down with Billboard's Bill Werde for a Q&A. Werde describes him as "unfailingly polite, though occasionally he flattens himself down into a black leather couch, hands jammed into his pockets, and seems bored," and "every bit a normal 18-year-old kid." Which is to say, he's a little bit of a dickhead.

For example, he wants you to know that he is very talented:

If you really don't enjoy the type of music I make and that's not you, OK. But don't say I'm not talented. If you haven't noticed, I wasn't made-I was found.

If you need proof of his talent beyond his word, consult his chart success:

[Believe Acoustic] is just an acoustic album of an album that I've already put out and it's going to go No. 1-that shows people that I'm still here and that talent rises above everything else. There's so much going on. Talent rises above all of that.

But he also doesn't quite have all his numbers right:

They say there's a sophomore slump. I didn't have one. It was really good to see [2012's Believe] at the top. When I was going on all these different talk shows when it was the No. 1 album of the year, just hearing that: No. 1 album of the year, Justin Bieber? That's a really great feeling.

(Believe was, in fact, the No. 1 album of 2012 only if you subtract 10 – it placed at No. 11 on Billboard's year-end chart.)

Being of such great talent, he was just as perplexed as his managing no-homo Svengali Scooter Braun, when he didn't receive any nominations for this year's Grammy Awards. Scooter tweeted, "I just plain DISAGREE. The kid deserved it. Grammy board u blew it on this one." Bieber tells Billboard:

I felt the same way that Scooter felt, I just can't really... it's good that he can put it out there and say that. He had my back just like any manager would. My whole life I've dreamed of winning a Grammy. At this point, the excitement of that has gone down. I'm more excited to just make great music for my fans. That's just something that if it happens, it happens.

He adds that he's "happy for the other artists who got nominated and have won Grammys. I'm 18 and I think that I have a lot ahead of me, so I'm not worried," but as to whether or not he'll attend the ceremony this year:

I will not be there.

When his career does start to sag, he assures us it will be of his choice:

I don't think that I'm going to be boiling hot for the rest of my career. I think that, if I'm not on top. it would be because I didn't want to be. It would be a time when I wanted to take a break and do movies or take a break and raise a family. When I'm doing music and I'm really focused, I'm not going to not be where I am.

The life of a child star is unenviable – the white-noise hiss of public approval and disdain is a hell of a backdrop for the still-forming mind. You spend so much time swimming upstream for your humanity, and then you wake up one day and you find yourself on a stage yelling, "I'm fifteh!" and refusing to come out for a second time or something.

That said, what a conceited, graceless little punk. No matter how much of an asshole adult he seems to be transforming into, he can't quite shake his inner brat.

[Billboard]

[Image via Getty]