Justin Bieber (and his laptop) headline Coachella Night 2
So this is how we find out Justin Bieber is a YouTube Premium subscriber.The 32-year-old teen-pop survivor headlined Coachella on Saturday night, and for roughly half an hour in the middle of his set, what Bieber did was sit behind a laptop and sing along to his old music videos — often an octave down from where he recorded them — as he searched up the songs on YouTube and played them over the festival’s state-of-the-art sound system.YouTube Premium, that is, given that he (and we) faced no ads during the performance.Expectations were insanely high for this show — Bieber’s first large-scale concert after a few years he spent in the pop-star wilderness recovering from various health ailments of both the physical and mental variety.Invite-only warm-up gigs he played over the last couple of weeks in L.A. led to widespread speculation that at Coachella he might play only material from last year’s “Swag” and “Swag II” comeback albums. Justin Bieber fans camp out at Coachella on Saturday waiting for Bieber’s headlining performance. The singer didn’t allow The Times to photograph his set. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times) And indeed that’s what he did for the first half-hour or so, singing songs like “All I Can Take,” “Speed Demon” and “Butterflies” — and singing them with extreme precision — accompanied by prerecorded backing tracks; after that, he brought out Carter Lang and Dylan Wiggins — two of his closest “Swag” collaborators — to do more of the “Swag” material “up close and personal with you guys,” as he put it.“This is a night I dreamed about for a long time,” he said, dressed in a red hoodie, shorts and Paddington-gone-Balenciaga rain boots.Together the three did gorgeous Christian-youth-group white-soul renditions of “Things You Do” and “Glory” and “Everything Hallelujah,” the last of which Bieber used to shout out his wife, Hailey Baldwin, who was in the crowd and made herself available to Coachella’s roving cameras.Then: “Feels like we gotta take you guys on a bit of a journey,” Bieber said. “You guys remember this song?”That was his own cue for a YouTube deep dive — it started with “Baby” and included “Never Say Never” and “Beauty and a Beat” — that made you wonder about the unresolved trauma he’s still dealing with from his child-star days. (Second night in a row for that, by the way, after Sabrina Carpenter on Friday.)“How far back do you go?” he asked the crowd at one point. “Are you really with the s—?”Bieber went on to play much-memed videos of himself running into a revolving door and himself falling off a stage; that led to an unfortunate little digression about the paparazzi and their rapacious ways.“These guys won’t leave you alone, bro,” he said before playing that famous video of the guy freaking out over the double rainbow.The final portion of the show had Bieber doing “Yukon,” then “Devotion” with Dijon — the vocals! — then “Essence” with Tems and Wizkid.“Tonight has been beautiful,” Bieber said before bringing out Mk.gee to close with “Daisies,” and he was right: This was a radical reframing of what a headlining Coachella performance is supposed to be, and I loved it.
