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Justin Bieber returned to the platform that first made him a viral sensation on the Coachella stage Saturday night.
After warming up the Indio, Calif., crowd with a few songs from his latest album, Swag II, and bringing out Australian artist Kid Laroi for a Stay duet, the Canadian pop export huddled up to a laptop for a nostalgic YouTube-powered detour.
Bieber rolled the clock all the way back to his pre-teen, hair-swooped days living in Stratford, Ont., singing along to clips of Baby, Favorite Girl and That Should Be Me in quick succession.
The 32-year-old sang along with his music videos karaoke-style, harmonizing in a more adult-sounding register — mostly a full octave lower. He looked to the fans for requests, asking whether they really knew him back then.
To screams, he pulled up a clip of him covering Chris Brown’s With You, set on a cheap blue couch in bad lighting, wearing a striped shirt and chain. The video itself could be a legal adult, posted 18 years ago and now viewed 64 million times.
YouTube was only two years old when Bieber first posted himself covering Ne-Yo’s So Sick at what appears to be a school talent show in 2007 — another deep cut that made his Coachella setlist. On the massive stage screens Bieber’s 12-year-old silhouette appeared in a white shirt and black tie. Only two years later he would embark on a juggernaut world tour promoting his albums My World and My World 2.0.
Bieber addressed some of the personal challenges he’s experienced living the spotlight with an Instagram post in June. “People keep telling me to heal. Don’t you think if I could have fixed myself I would have already?” Bieber wrote to his 291 million followers.
“I know I’m broken. I know I have anger issues,” he wrote. “I tried to do the work my whole life to be like the people who told me I needed to be fixed like them.”
Bieber added the situation “just keeps making me more tired and more angry.”
During his YouTube rabbit hole at Coachella, Bieber even revisited one of his less flattering viral moments, playing a clip of a confrontation with paparazzi. “I’m a dad, I’m a husband,” he said over the video. “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, is it?”
About an hour into his set, Bieber took his fingers off the keyboard and returned to his more recent material to close the show, bringing guests Dijon, Tems and Wizkid.
Pop star Katy Perry posted photos on Instagram showing her and Justin Trudeau holding hands and eating noodles at the festival, with the former prime minister wearing a backward baseball cap. In one of her videos Perry joked she was glad that Bieber had a YouTube Premium account, to save the audience from autoplaying ads.
Bieber was seemingly channelling the laid-back approach of fellow Coachella headliner Frank Ocean, who in 2023 delivered a set so stripped-down that it drew critical backlash.
If Bieber is still feeling angry about his time as a child star or his more troubled adult years leading up to Swag II, he managed not to show it on stage. Instead he ended the set crouching with the microphone, watching fireworks towering above his name.
