Justin Bieber, Pop Music’s Fallen Angel, Rises Again at Coachella
On the first Saturday of Coachella, Justin Bieber started his concert by looking down at a camera on the floor of the stage. If you were watching the show at home, on a laptop or a TV screen, via Coachella’s live stream on YouTube, he was, for a moment, looking you dead in the eye. If you were out in the Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs, where young people flock annually to get loud, hear their favorite tunes played live, hallucinate in group settings, and herald the coming of summer, you saw Bieber’s gaze emanating from a pair of huge screens. Either way, before things had really gotten going, the pop star was already acknowledging the fact that the “liveness” of his performance was a subtly shifting, always mediated, geographically expansive quality. He was in California, but also, if you wanted, in Albuquerque or Seoul or the South of France. If you could meet his gaze, outside or in bed, you were in some sense right there with him, humming along.
He was singing a song called “All I Can Take”—a distressing title that offers to catalogue, down to the most minute speck of experience, the limits of the singer’s patience, or of his sanity. In reality, though, the song’s lyrics are downbeat but vague, held together by a loose emotional logic. “These symptoms of my sensitivity,” Bieber sang. “There’s things that I can’t change: Lord knows I’ve tried. Ooh baby, we can leave it all behind.” It’s a love song, sort of. Maybe it narrates a moment after the singer has already had more than he can “take,” when he has finally decided to use romantic love as a fugitive vehicle, speeding him away at high velocity from the details of overwhelming everyday life.
Bieber’s stage was large, roundish, and mostly bare, with a hilly ridge around the edges. It was populated by neither background singers nor a band. It looked like a catcher’s mitt that had been flattened and truncated, or a diorama of a desert with the suggestion of many mountains surrounding it. He was alone, except for a thin lectern holding an Apple laptop. In its minimalism, chic or shabby, depending on your perspective, the stage looked a lot like the setup for Bieber’s recent performance at the Grammys, where he appeared naked except for a pair of socks and some baggy boxers, played the electric-guitar part for his song “Yukon” until he’d successfully recorded and looped it, then sang plaintively, unhelped by the company of other bodies or the excitements of, say, pyrotechnics.
Bieber, the former child star who, now past thirty, often gestures at a deep well of discontent, is currently in a stripped-down, melancholy, D.I.Y. phase. A guy who gets famous in the music business at such a young age—Bieber was barely a teen-ager when the world came to know his high, clear voice and innocent face—can’t help but be labelled a product, furnished with beats and lyrics, and made to play a part. Now Bieber wants us to know that he’s got his own ideas, his own artistry, his own bad mood. The only way to get the message across is to raze the usual clutter of spectacle.
In 2024, he posted a picture of himself placidly crying, a pair of tears running trails down his face. Sources claimed that at an Oscars after-party this year, he had a conspicuous altercation—maybe even physical—with the R. & B. star Usher, who, back in the day, claimed to be his mentor and chief booster. Bieber has had clashes with the paparazzi, and has sent ambiguous messages over social media hinting at his sorrow. Rich and famous though he is, life for Biebs ain’t been no crystal stair, and now he’s willing to risk boring or confusing us to make sure we know it.
For the first few songs at Coachella—all of them coming from his two latest albums, “SWAG” and “SWAG II,” released within two months of each other last year—Bieber wandered around the stage alone, sometimes ascending the gentle ridges on the outer ring. He wore a big, boxy, pinkish hoodie and ballooning pants that cut off at the shins: slouchily stylish, stuff picked out from the fanciest but loneliest bedroom in the world. His voice was in its usual form, bright and buoyant, but with a new heaviness that has creeped in with age. He often avoided the highest notes of the songs, letting a backing track do that airy work while he carved out choir-like lower harmony parts. These are his gifts: a fluid voice and a sterling ear. He’s never lost in a song and never seems nervous in the slightest. The guy’s a pro.
He didn’t offer much banter between songs, except some fairly bland expressions of gratitude to the rabid audience, which, by the camera’s evidence, was full of emotional fans mouthing each of his lyrics. “Wow wow wow wow,” he said softly, without the vocal emphasis that so many “wow”s would imply. “To be up and close and personal with you guys, man: this is special. This is a night I dreamed about for a long time, so to be here is amazing.” He didn’t sound so amazed.
Bieber had stepped onto a smaller stage, more sharply circular than the first, and two acoustic guitarists came to sit on either side of him, flanking him like twin cherubs attentive at their harps. They eventually glided into a song called “Glory Voice Memo.” In the recorded version, the audio quality is scratchy; the song is more an improvised sketch than a fleshed-out composition. It’s a straightforwardly religious tune with bluesy themes:
The peak is a kind of praising howl:
Bieber has always been outspoken about his faith. (Speaking of being “let down,” his public father-son-like relationship with the popular former Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz—the emergent sort of new-agey, vaguely hip-hop motivationalist who struts his way through the sermon wearing skinny jeans and aviator glasses—petered out after Lentz was caught having an alleged affair.) After having played the sadboi for a while, crooning about love across a chasm of alienating grief, now he was the heart-on-fire, born-again penitent. A ring of lights far behind and above his head looked like a tasteful bracelet, or a halo. Another song he sang was called “Everything Hallelujah.”
Hearing this explicitly devotional detour in his set offered another way to interpret Bieber’s voice. Although he has tried on many personas—the yearning teen (“Baby”), the wised-up loverboy (“Love Yourself”), or the ongoing turn as a heartbroken artist hoping to show himself once and for all—he has in many ways always been, at least on the level of style, a Christian-contemporary-music artist. You can’t think of a C.C.M. song—the best ones featuring intensifying, drone-like repetitions and an undertone of intermingled ecstasy and sorrow—that wouldn’t be improved with a guest verse by Bieber. He’s got a great vocal range, but seldom strains or goes gritty or risks cracking the glass surface of the song.
Part of why “SWAG” and “SWAG II” are such interesting albums, suggesting a whole forest full of hidden pathways for Bieber’s career, is that their spare, sometimes harsh production plays in interesting contrast to Bieber’s stubbornly smooth delivery. Even when he’s talking his biggest shit, professing to be “bad,” the larger implication is that it’s been a journey, a conversion in reverse. He’s pop music’s fallen angel, always threatening to rise again.
The guitars disappeared and Bieber was alone again. Now he approached the altar of his laptop. What intimacy! Maybe you have a friend like this, who convenes six or eight people at a time in her living room, YouTube on the TV screen, just to play music videos, first new ones that she’s discovered, then, gradually, a bevy of oldies that turn the screening into a dance party. In our new day of algorithmic individuality, it’s hard to really know a person better than this.
Teasingly, Bieber started to play his own videos, going back and back into his early catalogue. “I feel like we gotta take you guys on a bit of a journey,” he said. Soon, he was watching the homemade videos of cover songs that made him famous: Chris Brown’s “With You,” Ne-Yo’s “So Sick.” He looked up at the huge onscreen version of his younger self with an air of something like astonishment. “Was I really that little?” he seemed to be thinking. He kept looking back and singing along, sometimes taking the octave below his long-gone young-boy soprano’s high notes, sometimes flitting into harmonies that made the old songs sound sadder.
There was a camera affixed to the laptop; between songs, you could see his face as the computer must—big, inquisitive, hungry for history. He looked like a live streamer, his screen a collage of revealing former moments.
The concert was a kind of four-act scheme—obvious loneliness, public revelation, private reminiscence, and then . . . what? That’s the big question about Bieber. He has been open about struggles with his mental health, has floridly thanked his wife, Hailey, for sticking with him through the worst depths, has turned the by now cliché trauma of child stardom into a compelling portrait of inner unrest. But what’s next? He’s got a whole life yet to live, more songs to sing, unless this recent foray into a kind of pop performance art is a way of saying goodbye. I doubt it.
Suddenly there were lots of other presences onstage, arriving in waves—the singer-songwriter Dijon, one of his closest collaborators on the “SWAG” series; the Afro-pop eminences Wizkid and Tems, to sing a remix of Wizkid’s song “Essence”; the singer and producer Mk.Gee, shredding on a guitar. The stage was awash in purples and pinks, psychedelic with the promise of exciting company. Suddenly Bieber was dancing around, trading fun glances with his fellow-artists, finally gesturing toward the usually obvious fact that a concert might also be an uncomplicatedly good time.
Bieberchella, as it’s been called, was wistful, intriguing, and soon quite controversial. Lots of people online are calling it a lazy way to deliver a show for which Bieber was paid a reported ten million bucks. (He plays again on the second Saturday of the festival.) But to my eye, it was also strangely fertile with ideas about pop performance in an isolated age. Maybe the last bit, the part with all the friends showing up, was the first tendril of a big question: Having emptied out the party—the great commons of a mass-media audience—how do you start it up again? ♦