One of the unique charms of working in Rockefeller Center is that, thanks to the Today Show, you’re often exposed to pop sensations you might have otherwise entirely avoided.

Sometimes, this works out. This is how I found out what Katy Perry looked like, and I’m very happy that I did.

Other times, not so much. On Monday, I trudged to work through a howling crowd of 9-year-old girls (and a few of the 45-year-old mustachioed men who somehow always make it out to the same events), holding signs saying things like, “Marry Me, Justin Bieber!”

The thing is, until that moment, I had no idea who Justin Bieber was. Not even a little. I had never heard the name so much as uttered. This was my introduction to Justin Bieber.

Fascinated as I frequently am by silly matters of pop culture, I turned on NBC when I got into the office.

Turns out Justin Bieber is a 15-year-old boy who looks like an 11-year-old girl and carries on like Usher while singing like, well, just any average 11-year-old girl, I guess. It’s not that he’s a bad singer. He wasn’t terrible. He just wasn’t particularly good.

I’m not a reliable judge of 15-year-old boys, but based on the anticipation of all those little girls, I’d guess that Justin Bieber is quite hot. It appeared that, though those girls might not have known exactly what they wanted, they knew they wanted to have it with Justin Bieber.

Poor kid. He’s got about a 1 in 500,000 chance to maintain any sort of relevance past puberty, and even if he does, it’s a pretty safe bet he’ll be psychologically scarred in some irreparable way.

But what’s really mind-boggling about Justin Bieber is that apparently he got his start as a YouTube sensation. So maybe I had it wrong all the time I used to spend blaming record companies back when I was sure they were shoving Britney and ‘N SYNC down our throats because they were just easily marketable, pretty crap.

Maybe people just like pretty crap, and they’ll find it their damn selves if the record companies can’t do it at a rapid enough rate. Or maybe the whole “YouTube sensation” label is itself some marketing trick from the record company to make Justin Bieber seem in some way more legit than all the doe-eyed pop stars before him. Maybe they just cherry-picked a marketable YouTube sensation.

All I know is the dude’s been a trending topic on Twitter basically since the moment I heard of him. I guess he’s blowing up big time. Here’s hoping he enjoys it while it lasts.