Justin Bieber’s highly anticipated Coachella set has been brutally criticised by some as ‘low-effort’ or ‘a snoozefest.’
But those fans are missing the point, and, in fact, Bieber’s performance might have been the most moving and self-aware piece of art in the festival’s history.
Because, in a staggering feat of self-awareness, the pop star’s show acknowledged a difficult truth: no one is really a Justin Bieber fan anymore; they’re fans of 2010.
The 32-year-old Canadian singer is one of three acts headlining this year’s festival alongside Sabrina Carpenter and Karol G – with the event also marking his major live performance comeback.
Midway through the show at the famous California festival, he pivoted to his back catalogue in a way that was almost absurdly literal: playing his old music videos on YouTube on a laptop, buffering and all, as if dragging his own mythology back through the same technological portal that created it.
Songs like Baby, Sorry, and Never Say Never were not performed in the traditional sense, but mediated through the technology that made them ubiquitous in the first place.
He even played the covers that led to his discovery, Chris Brown’s With You and NeYo’s So Sick, harmonizing with the pre-teen version of himself.
At one point he mimed the viral ‘it’s not clocking…’ paparazzi video word for word as it played behind him, a meta comment on his own early-internet celebrity.
Online reaction to Justin Bieber’s Coachella set
‘The way Justin Bieber is just doing karaoke to his own songs at Coachella…I’m so disappointed!! I wasn’t expecting anything too big or long, but to do sing a longs & cut the songs off and not do a proper medley with transitions…kinda lame,’ user Tristan posted on X.
‘Justin Bieber supposedly got paid TEN million dollars to sing at Coachella only for him to show clips on a laptop? This is below bare minimum,’ Kay declared.
‘No artist has been less interested in playing their Coachella set less than Justin Bieber is,’ Evan shared.
‘Justin Bieber currently has a laptop set up on the Coachella main stage, pulling up his own YouTube videos and basically karaokeing whatever comes to mind from his searches. No setlist — just whatever he finds on YouTube. A few videos have even had to buffer. Honestly…kind of incredible to watch,’ FestiveOwl wrote.
‘Can’t believe that this is a headliner this is just a mess no good production, horrible visuals, no outfit changes, no backup dancers and performing khia songs. Who made him headline,’ Cyberstar added.
Others called it a ‘snoozefest’, ‘lazy’, and even ‘garbage’.
People who are criticising the performance as a ‘YouTube karaoke night,’ are missing the power of the statement Bieber was making.
His career has always been inseparable from the moment in which he became famous, and his staying power has been less about the songs themselves and more about timing, and his Coachella set proved that.
He was originally a phenomenon in the last days of innocence before algorithms learned how to give us profitable eating disorders, before every teenager became a micro-influencer for Botox, before ‘the future of democracy’ was a dark, glaring question mark.
The current music landscape is as fractured as the political landscape, and it’s impossible to point to any one sound or artist as representative of the moment.
So festival planners are banking on the one thing that can define this era: Nostalgia for a simpler (surprisingly recent) past. A past that Bieber’s music and persona represent, and that he played on beautifully in his set.
Why is Justin Bieber so synonymous with the 2010s?
Bieber’s debut hit Baby from 2010, is a portal to an era when computers still lived in a special room in the house, and the internet felt like a playground rather than an addiction.
Many of us can recall gathering around the family PC with a group of friends after school, dancing along to the Baby music video, and that’s the experience Bieber offered to the enormous festival crowd.
It was a period when teens were increasingly online for the first time in history, and many of them were more tech literate than their parents and therefore largely unsupervised online.
As a result, the intense feelings of devotion that Bieber evoked – reminiscent of Beatles-mania, teen girls’ reactions to Elvis, and countless other instances of teen heartthrob earning followings – took on a brand-new, hyper-online facet among his young fandom.
In 2013, Twitter reported Bieber was the most-tweeted-about person in the world. His fans dominated hashtags, trended topics daily, and organised mass voting campaigns for awards in a way the world had never seen before.
On YouTube, he became the first artist to hit one billion views (Baby again), proof that his audience lived online in ways no previous teen fandom had — something his Coachella set so cleverly referenced.
Fans of Bieber’s weren’t just uniting at his concerts or in line to buy his music as in years past; they were spending countless hours watching YouTube videos of him, talking to each other about him in chat rooms, and bidding on eBay for merch and Justin-related items.
As a result, they built a sense of identity tied to him more than any previous fandom, and this was only made possible by the internet’s ability to intensify and reward obsession.
At the same time as the internet created Bieber’s career, it was also new enough not to be oversaturated with things vying for our attention the way it is today.
Now, teenage hyperfixations play out in niches obscure enough to go unnoticed by outsiders, and with so many competing options online, each obsession tends to burn out quickly before being replaced by the next.
In contrast, in the early 2010s, Bieber was such a force on the internet that he was inescapable even for those uninterested.
He truly managed to become the most famous pop star in history – before or since – thanks to the specific global moment in which he found fame.
That collective identity established by his fans has outlasted his catalog. Ask an adult fan today what keeps them invested, and they’ll rarely mention his voice or lyrics. Instead, they’ll talk about the feeling of being 13, of making their first online friends, of discovering community through a crush on a pop star.
That ubiquity makes him less a single celebrity than a symbol of the entire era – something no star today could quite achieve in the vast, overcrowded landscape of culture.
His recent albums – Swag and Swag II – aren’t cultural events so much as Easter eggs for Beliebers to decode, tribute acts to the deity that was Justin Bieber and the phenomenon that was Bieber Fever.
The absolute feral energy of the crowd at Coachella proved this more effectively than anything else could.
Why Justin Bieber is already a nostalgia act at Coachella 2026
Nostalgia in music isn’t new, of course – plenty of bands extend their careers by transporting listeners back to another era – but what’s striking in Bieber’s case is how quickly it happened.
His explosion to global fame coincided precisely with the tech revolution’s first acceleration of cultural turnover.
That speed is, genuinely, new: in the ’90s, thirty-somethings looked back at the 70s, a 20-year cycle. By the 2010s, Tumblr was already rebranding the 90s just a decade later.
Bieber embodies that acceleration because his fame hit in the final days of a now-bygone era defined by the fact that it was even possible to get as famous as he was, thanks to the burgeoning internet.
And, perhaps more importantly, he’s managed to undergo very little artistic evolution since those early days. The very fact that his latest albums are named Swag – a word almost as emblematic of the early 2010s as Bieber himself – makes that clear.
But it doesn’t matter that he never recreated himself in Taylor Swift-style eras. When you’re as famous as Bieber was in 2010 – when you created an army of zealous fans more devoted than any fandom before them -you can ride that wave for the rest of your life.
While his peers – Taylor Swift, Drake, Lady Gaga – are still framed as evolving artists, Bieber is usually described in terms of ‘returns’ and ‘comebacks,’ largely because he just had nowhere left to go.
Even if Bieber had attempted to redefine himself, there was truly nowhere to go but down after his initial success.
Even his 2021 hit Peaches was hailed by Rolling Stone as a ‘grown-up sequel to Baby,’ proof that his story always circles back to the white-hot poignancy of his cultural importance at the beginning of his career.
Politically, too, Bieber emerged at a time that we can now see as a hinge: the Obama years still bathed the US in optimism, Brexit and Trump were unthinkable, and the Arab Spring had not yet curdled.
For millennials and early Gen Z, Bieber became a monument to that brief, naïve era when we really believed things would get better.
And now, with modern music offering little escape from or explanation for the scary reality of the world as it is now, it’s clear why fans would gravitate towards nostalgia instead of new pop stars.
So while it was die-hard Beliebers cheering when he took the stage at Coachella 2026, they weren’t alone. Those of us panicked by the cultural and political now, craving the simplicity of then, sang along just as loudly.
And at Coachella weekend two, fans are certain to once again line up for the fleeting chance to feel like it’s 2010 again.
A version of this article was first published on September 16, 2025.
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