One of Music’s Biggest Stars Delivered a Divisive Coachella Performance. It Was Glorious.

We might be past flu season, but that didn’t stop hordes of millennials and zoomers from catching a familiar illness this past weekend: Bieber Fever. Longtime fans of Canadian pop star Justin Bieber tuned in to watch (both in person and via YouTube livestream) his highly anticipated headlining performance at Coachella, the popular American music festival that takes place for two weekends in the California desert every year. Coachella headlining performances are massive deals for a musician’s career, earning them millions of dollars and a massive boost in cultural cachet, often cementing them as the new, or reigning, titans of the pop pantheon. But for Bieber, the opportunity signified something more. When he released Swag last year—a behemoth of a double album that ended a yearslong break during which the singer almost became more known for his worrisome appearance and uncouth public behavior than for his music—to critical appreciation (but not quite full-throated acclaim), onlookers who’d been worried about his well-being breathed a sigh of relief. The next thing to do was to take Swag to the stage, a place Bieber hadn’t visited at a large scale since canceling his “Justice” world tour early in 2023 because of health issues. This Coachella performance was a huge comeback opportunity for Bieber, whose most recent televised display—a Grammys showing so stripped down he did it in nothing but underwear—raised a few eyebrows. Beliebers had high expectations for his Coachella stage, and even Bieber agnostics were curious about what he would do.

But, when Bieber did finally take the stage on Saturday night, it quickly became clear that this would be the most divisive set at the entire festival.

At the height of his teenybopper fame, Bieber was known for involved pop performances that included background dancers, a full onstage band, dance breaks, and serenades of individual lucky fans. On the Coachella main stage, though, Bieber opted to stand solo without dancers or a band, while dressed in a relaxed outfit—an oversize hoodie from his own budding clothing line, SKYLRK, jean shorts, and black Loewe boots—for a decidedly unadorned performance on a minimalist stage design that resembled a giant circular sofa. Bieber sounded phenomenal, opting to sing Swag tracks for the first half of his set. In the run-up to his performance, fans had speculated whether Bieber, who has a complicated relationship with the early era of his career, would perform his landmark hits. To the audience’s delight, he did—in a way that no one had been expecting.

Instead of performing his older songs with musical accompaniment, he sang along to his own music videos. He did this in the most low-tech way possible, sitting at a stool and using a MacBook laptop that was patched in to mirror his laptop screen on a larger screen behind him. With a camera facing him as he scrolled, the audience was able to watch him and his screen as he proceeded to pull up his various tracks on YouTube. Thankfully, he had YouTube Premium, so the audience didn’t have to sit through ads as Bieber searched for songs like “Baby,” scrubbed to specific sections of each track, and sang along for a snippet while the recording of his younger self crooned behind him. There was no dancing, no fanfare, no frills.

Many likened this throwback section of Bieber’s time slot—arguably the most anticipated part of his set—to the internet meme of “gay music video night,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the long-standing phenomenon of queer people having their friends over only to wind up watching a series of (mostly pop) music videos. Whether this was a good thing or not depended on who you asked. Many online critics chastised Bieber not merely for the low-energy performance itself, but for what they saw as a gendered double standard. Bieber’s showcase appeared almost laughably simple when juxtaposed with that of pop princess Sabrina Carpenter, another one of this year’s Coachella headliners, who mounted a full-blown theatrical performance on Saturday that served as a meticulous homage to Old Hollywood, complete with an intricate set, costume changes, choreography, background dancers, and interludes—both live and prerecorded—with popular stars like Susan Sarandon and Will Ferrell. For many disgruntled viewers, the question to ask was: If Bieber were a woman, would he have gotten away with sitting down and staging Bieber’s Greatest Hits on YouTube in front of thousands of live viewers, and even more remote spectators?

But, while it’s undeniable that female performers are held to higher standards in some ways—expected to dance harder, dress better, and do more—these charges of sexism feel ignorant of Bieber’s rise to fame. He was discovered on YouTube and, after signing a deal at 13 with Usher and Scooter Braun’s record label, became a sensation seemingly overnight, all before even going through puberty. His success came at a cost of blood, sweat, and tears, as he was expected to offer multidimensional performances on the stage, and performances of grace off of it, to the mounting detriment of his physical and mental health. (Or, as culture journalist Kyndall Cunningham jokingly and lovingly put it on X: He was “doing pop girl shit” while also abusing substances.) The sky-high expectations placed on Bieber put an intense amount of pressure on a child who was, in hindsight, not ready to handle it. (To be fair, how many kids are?) Bieber already spent much of his childhood giving us the high-tier performances we’ve come to expect of the Coachella stage since Beyoncé’s famous 2018 “Beychella” performance raised the bar. After so many years spent fighting to reconcile a healthy future with those early years of toil—a war that it has often looked like Bieber is losing—it feels only fair that, nearly two decades into his career, he has earned a moment of pared-back catharsis, where he can reminisce on his own terms instead of performing on ours.

The whole thing also felt perfectly full circle. Bieber wouldn’t have the life he has now if it weren’t for his early start busking on the streets of Stratford, Ontario, and posting music covers to YouTube under the account name Kidrauhl. Most of his career highlights and lowlights, too, have erupted online. Bieber not only singing along to younger videos of himself, but also laughing at viral clips of himself running into glass doors, falling off stages, or creating memes that would go on to inspire today’s cultural lexicon, was beyond fitting for an artist shaped by the internet as much as he has been. It makes sense that, in a moment of reassessing his relationship to fame and music, Bieber would want to approach his career the way so many of his fans have: by pulling up YouTube to listen to a boy who, when all is said and done, just loves to make music.