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Justin Bieber’s Coachella headline performance was a huge hit with Gen Z this week. Sitting with a laptop and playing old YouTube videos, the singer’s minimalist approach rattled millennials who still expect the spectacle of yesteryear.
Justin Bieber’s Coachella headline show has been all over social media this week, breaking records for views, engagement, merch sales, and salary payouts.
Reportedly making over $10 million USD for his two-hour setlist, Bieber kept the show extremely minimal. He had no backup dancers, set changes, costume swaps, or big spectacle moments. Instead, he spent one third of the show sitting on a laptop playing old YouTube videos and singing along with the crowd, akin to a very expensive karaoke session. He searched for many of his old, nostalgic hits on screen, streaming clips of memes and viral moments from his past. Justin live-streamed on Twitch months before the festival, too, showing the rehearsal process and recording candid conversations with musicians and artists.
While all that may sound like a snoozy disaster (some may recall Frank Ocean’s chaotic headline slot a few years back), the performance has gone down extremely well with Gen Z, both in terms of monetary gain and cultural relevance. At least in the UK, nine of Bieber’s songs across different eras are in the top 50. ‘Beauty and a Beat,’ the 2012 hit featuring the newly MAGA-converted Nicki Minaj, is fourth.
On social media, clips of Bieber throughout the show are racking up millions of views. Most are taken from the laptop portion of the set, featuring moments where old hits like ‘Baby’ and ‘One Less Lonely Girl’ were played on screen while Bieber duetted with himself. Comments have largely been positive, as fans praise his set and return to the spotlight following years of health issues and hardship.
Merch sales via his brand Skylrk were over $5.4 million USD at Coachella across its first weekend, breaking all previous records. The closest anyone else has come is $1.7 million USD in sales across both weekends. Bieber’s single Yukon jumped 21% on streaming platforms, with 24.6 million unique streams across his catalogue the day after Coachella. It’s fair to say that Bieber fever is sweeping the US and UK.
Yet, despite all the joyful buzz, there has clearly been a divide in reactions.
While a large majority of Gen Zers and younger millennials understood the point of his set design and aesthetic choices, a vocal number of older journalists have made a point to denounce the show as ‘lacklustre’ and lazy.’ Rolling Stone described the event as ‘too basic in its perseveration to warrant so much hype,’ adding that it was a ‘trial of patience.’ Other outlets have run away with buzzwords for clicks, with Lad Bible highlighting criticism that called the show the ‘worst of all time.’
Bieber being sandwiched between two female headliners who opted for grandiose spectacle – the literal antithesis of his approach – has also fuelled debate regarding gender expectations and industry sexism. Do we set different standards for men and women when it comes to outfit choices and stage presence? Were Sabrina Carpenter and Karol G expected to rise to the occasion in ways that Bieber wasn’t? Some believe the gap is vast, with Coachella serving as a microcosm of a wider issue.
Still, to dismiss Bieber’s performance as low effort and solely an exercise in patriarchal indulgence does a disservice to the struggles he has overcome.
For many fans who are his age or younger, there seems to be a collective acknowledgement that he was mistreated by the public and music industry early in his career. Justin has detailed his struggles with fame and health issues before. Clips showing other celebrities blatantly invading his personal space as a teenager in the early 2010s are often shared online. His disturbingly close relationship with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs as a young teenager has pushed the public to recontextualise and reconsider.
For Gen Zers who grew up with his music, who may have changed their opinions over time and realised how much he must have endured fifteen years ago, it feels oddly personal and affecting. It’s this connection that millennials may not understand. For those in their late thirties and forties, Bieber is just another pop act. For Gen Z, he is a staple of childhood who symbolises a different era, where industry abuse was unspoken and rife, and where he was intensely hated for seemingly no reason.
The man has been in the spotlight for fifteen years and has, by all accounts, created a legacy large enough to accommodate a stripped-back Coachella headline set. This straightforward, simple show connected all of his previous eras to the person he is today, and helped to reconnect fans and listeners who are now adults and can admit that they were wrong about him in the past. It felt refreshingly honest and vulnerable.
That’s why it was so successful, despite not having all the showmanship of a typical Coachella performance. To dismiss it entirely for a lack of visual spectacle misses this point entirely, and ignores the major cultural impact and emotional investment that Gen Z have in Bieber. Not everything needs to be a maximalist, theatrical performance to be effective. Sometimes a simple singalong is all you need.
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