Was Justin Bieber's Coachella set good?

Waaaahooooooo! Here we go, people. It’s our last New York show on the books for the season. It’s on May 5th at 7:00pm at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And the special guest is… podcaster PJ Vogt, host of Search Engine. Huge thanks to our previous guests Katie Notopoulos, Akilah Hughes, and Don Lemon. And thank you to all of you who’ve come out to these. They’ve been such a blast and it’s been great getting to meet you all. You can grab tickets to our May show by hitting the green button below.

On Saturday night, Justin Bieber headlined Coachella. It was a stripped down set, with barely any actual stage production and, at one point, Bieber opened up YouTube on a laptop on stage and started playing his old music videos — along with Vine compilations and the “Double Rainbow” video. The festival keeps copyright-striking links to the performance, but this link still might work.

There are a lot of takes flying around about whether or not this was a “good” performance. Some I agree with — that only a man like Bieber could get away with something so sloppy, while Sabrina Carpenter, who headlined on Friday, basically had to put on a one-woman Broadway musical. And some that are hilariously wrong — that it was some kind of way to protest the sale of his masters in 2023 a la Taylor Swift. (That’s not how live music works.) Though, I think Yahoo! News reporter Kelsey Weekman had the best take on the whole thing, writing on X, “In straight male culture, showing someone a YouTube video means you love them. I thought Justin Bieber was perfect.”

If you’re desperate for a coherent explanation for what Bieber did this weekend, it’s very likely that he was inspired by Frank Ocean’s equally chaotic Coachella performance in 2023, which Bieber gushed over on Instagram at the time. Though, Bieber’s set this weekend also reminded me of Shia LaBeouf’s 2015 stunt where he spent 10 hours watching his own movies in reverse chronological order. Particularly the moment where Bieber dueted with a 2008 YouTube upload of his cover of Chris Brown’s “With You.”

But let’s zoom out a sec here. Coachella is not a real music festival for actual human beings. Single-day tickets cost upwards of $600 and weekend passes go for over $1,000. As Pitchfork wrote last year, “Won’t someone think of the brand activations? Has anyone checked on the Klarna executives?” And as Popular Information reported this morning, Coachella is far from some kind of sacred space for art. The festival is run by Anschutz Entertainment Group, which is owned by Philip Anschutz, a right-wing billionaire who donates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to Republican initiatives and anti-LGBTQ organizations. I don’t want to veer too hard into “Yet you participate in society” territory here, but how dare Bieber disrespect the adult children of Northrop Grumman executives having vision quests in the desert to Laufey!

Coachella is, also, clearly creaking with age. What started in 1999 as a Pearl Jam-led protest against Ticketmaster prices morphed into a bastion of millennial excess in the 2010s. An identity-less industry conference for poptimist iPod commercial muzak. In 2018, Beyoncé was the first black woman to headline the festival — which should tell you all you need to know about it. And, one could argue, she broke it forever, turning a glorified Apple keynote into an arms race for massive pop acts that want to one-up each other with an audacious headlining performance. But every signal we still have for measuring culture is flashing red, screaming that this whole era is coming to an end. Case in point, the numerous influencers on TikTok right now complaining that their brand-sponsored trips to the festival were canceled. The whole thing’s tumbling down.

Going back to the question of whether Bieber’s set was “good,” I’d like to offer that that’s not what’s important here. Instead, I think it was “cool.” Which is different. I wrote about all of this back in February, arguing that “pre-deplatforming” was the key to the new cool for Gen Z. Brat Summer was clearly the first true attempt at this. Though, I think it was probably a little too early (and too millennial by the end). I’ve argued that coolness has always been defined by danger and taboo and that, in our current world, the most dangerous thing you can do is make unmonetizable content. Or in Bieber’s case, get paid $10 million for a performance too weird and ugly and personal for the venue housing it. “If you’re trying to imagine what comes next for media, you merely have to ask, what can be cut out of the equation,” I wrote in a followup post back in February. One of the world’s biggest pop stars watching random YouTube videos on stage at one of the world’s biggest music festivals fits that argument pretty well if you ask me!

Was there a double standard this weekend with regards to gender? Certainly. It’s the water we all swim in. But, also, perhaps not as much as you’d think. Even though she was also a headliner this weekend, I actually don’t think Carpenter is the best comparison to make here. She’s a pop star at the beginning of her career (relatively) and her audience — and aesthetics — are totally different from what Bieber was trying to do. There was another woman at Coachella, however, that was exploring similar themes this weekend. Australian DJ Ninajirachi played a set on Friday night where she, unlike Bieber, literally just played recordings of her own music. She played it from two CDJ mixers, though, which may have helped the aesthetics go down smoother. And behind her was a video screen blasting a torrent of glitch art, brainrot, and, at times, footage of herself using her Macbook’s Photo Booth. And I haven’t seen any discourse about it! Is it because Ninjarachi is a lesser known artist than Carpenter? Or that she’s working in a different genre? Or is it that her fans are better clued into which way the wind is blowing? (Or all three?)

The through line is that internet has successfully flattened the online and the offline world and, in doing so, has fundamentally changed the aesthetics of fame. In a world where everything we see is optimized, a lack of polish feels more authentic. And that appearance of authenticity feels new and exciting. Bieber had a camera hooked up to the laptop’s screen — and the laptop hooked up to the screens behind him — so it’s not like all of this just randomly happened. But it was meant to feel like if it was as impromptu as your favorite streamer pulling up a clip. And I can’t think of anything more fitting for our current moment than watching a man sat at a laptop having some kind of manic crashout, frantically using YouTube to play his own memories back to himself, as a crowd of thousands argues with each other about why anyone would ever want to watch such a thing.

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Way back in 2022, Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, wrote a piece titled, “Welcome to hell, Elon.” In the piece, Patel argues that Musk, by purchasing Twitter, would basically destroy his reputation and waste all of his time and money slowly repeating all of the same policies that made Twitter what it was from first principles.

And, based on X’s Head of Product Nikita Bier’s posts over the last month, it certainly seems like that is still the case. Bier has been pushing through a series of changes to the site’s For You algorithm that would financially penalize “aggregators” and go after any account that overused “🚨BREAKING.”

If you’d like to see how angry all of the various spam accounts on X are about this, here’s a post with a bunch of delicious screenshots to peruse. But just in case you think this is a signal that X is getting less hospitable for right-wing slop, Bier, in another post over the weekend, said that users should be making more “talking videos” like this German YouTuber who makes radical centrist digital nomad content.

Anthrophic is warning everyone that will listen that their new Mythos model will destroy the entire internet. As Tom’s Hardware discovered, though, those claims are not exactly accurate. But telling everyone over and over again that your technology will eradicate the human race is great marketing and even better for pressuring hapless politicians into carving off special regulations for your software. There are definitely no downsides at all.

If you’re feeling buried by all the hyperbolic AI headlines right now and need a reality check, I highly recommend @husk.irl on Instagram, who keeps making fantastic videos showing exactly how dumb these models are. For instance, did you know December has an “X” in it?

Speaking of young men having internet-induced fits of mania, Clavicular went on Australia’s version of 60 Minutes over the weekend and got real mad when journalist Adam Hegarty asked him if he identifies as an incel. “I’m not linked to that group in any way,” Clavicular angrily replied and then stormed out of the interview. Of course, the walk out happened after 50 minutes of (extremely boring) conversation. So I’m not totally sure what the point of it was.

I hate to give Clavicular some credit here, but asking him if he’s an incel is actually a pretty stupid conversation! He’s clearly not. He’s, at the very least, mimicked receiving oral sex on livestreams. There are a lot of institutions right now trying to reckon with a generation of violently misogynist young men that talk like incels and don’t really have the language or knowledge to really talk to them anymore. And, as we’re seeing with this interview, they get a lot more publicity — and legitimacy — storming out of the interviews than the TV programs platforming them do asking them idiotic questions about internet stuff they don’t understand.

—by Adam Bumas

On Sunday, the X account @ImStillDissin uploaded two animated clips, saying they were leaks from the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender animated film, which they would upload in its entirety. Before the clips were removed, they looked credible — to nerd out for a second, the animation is on both ones and twos, which no one has bothered getting AI to mimic in the hyper-optimized age of 4K60FPS.

This is probably the most drastic case yet, but X has been a haven for movie leaks ever since Elon took it over. The combo of a CEO who hates trust and safety and an embarrassing pivot to video means the platform is a lot less interested in — or able to — remove copyrighted video. And the problem gets worse when it gets multiplied by all the other incentives on the everything app. Multiple news sources are uncritically reporting @ImStillDissin’s claim that they were “accidentally emailed” the movie, despite another account, appearing to be the same person, saying “Putting some blatant misinfo in that caption was genius”.

Which gives you a clue to how online the party responsible is. The leaked clips had a watermark saying “#PeggleCrew,” the name of a group of hackers that were responsible for multiple high-profile hacks in 2016, most notably a trojan virus that infected Audacity and ClassicShell with a meme-filled message. The Avatar hacker’s secondary account is listed as joining Twitter in June 2016, just after an account with an almost identical name was suspended. The suspended account claimed credit for hacking the official NFL account and tweeting that Commissioner Roger Goodell had died.

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***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***