“I’m a dad. I’m a husband. You’re not getting it. It’s not clocking to you. It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business.”
This past weekend, Justin Bieber became a first-time Coachella festival headliner. The dad, husband, and king of standing on business, rocked the Indio, California stage in a SKYLRK uniform on a space-inspired stage.
This comes a couple months after his first live performance of the “SWAG” era at the Grammys in February, where Bieber channeled his recent collaborators Dijon and Mk.gee while delivering his most “stripped-down” performance yet, standing on stage with a guitar, some pedals and a drum machine in nothing but his boxers to perform “YUKON”.
A pivot from the stuff of Bieber’s past, his new music has taken on a more laid-back R&B approach, and his performance reflected that.
With appearances from The Kid Laroi, Tems, Wizkid, Dijon, and Mk.gee, Bieber ran through tracks from “SWAG” and “SWAG II” before spending the latter half of the show scrolling through Youtube on his Macbook, flipping through memes and old songs (notably pausing right before Nicki Minaj’s verse on Beauty and a Beat, a safe choice considering her recent collaboration with the people of Turning Point USA, and the reference to ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez)
The YouTube karaoke approach resulted in some heavy social media criticism, citing his approach as lazy considering the reported $10 million sum he was paid to perform, while others praised the casual, more intimate style of performance. When compared to Sabrina Carpenter, Friday’s headliner, it’s clear that an elaborate stage design is no financial burden.
So was it lazy?
For someone who hasn’t performed a full concert since their cancelled tour in 2022, I think just the sight of Bieber back on stage was enough to be worth the price for many fans. Along with that, it’s clear that, regardless of what others want, the now 32-year-old pop star doesn’t really feel the need to return to the choreo and showmanship of his younger days; he would rather display this new, more faithful, fatherly Bieber.
It’s always interesting to see how young stars handle growing up, and for Bieber something is clearly working, since after the Coachella performance my mom sent me a text about being “in her swag era.” But more significantly, after the weekend 1 performance, 21 of his songs entered Spotify’s Global Top 200, marking a new record for the most of any artist following a festival set, according to Forbes.