At Coachella, Justin Bieber flipped the camera — and reminded us how YouTube changed everything

It’s been years since we last encountered a piece of Justin Bieber drama worth chewing over, but the singer’s performance at Coachella has given us something to talk about. By singing along with his old YouTube videos, Bieber ignited a controversy — and may have involuntarily provided an intriguing commentary on the relationship between social media and live music.

During the middle of his set, Bieber pulled up YouTube on his computer and started playing videos from the early days of his channel, back when he was still known online as kidrauhl. As baby Biebs strummed away on the screen, the adult version of the pop star sang along to his old Usher and Chris Brown covers.

The stunt — which ended up including other Bieber videos and random YouTube favorites like the “double rainbow” guy — drew polarized reactions online. Critics felt that the YouTube detour fell short of the spectacle Bieber’s fans had come to see. Others questioned whether such a low-rent portion of the show really deserved to come with a rumored $10 million performance fee.

Others, however, understood that Bieber was turning the spotlight back on his fans. He may be the pop star, but his fans made him the big shot he is today, in part because they consumed his early YouTube videos en masse. Watching kidrauhl clips with his fans let him relive a rise that would have looked very different in an age before the internet.

“There was something beautiful, even thrilling, about watching Bieber trawl YouTube,” reads GQ‘s review of the set. Music critic Anthony Fantano also praised the stunt, dubbing it a “postmodern piece of performance art” that could only come from a YouTube legend. “He’s displaying to the audience the way that he as an artist, and he as a person, grew up on the internet,” Fantano said.

There’s another wrinkle to this: Live music and social media are becoming inextricable from one another. Once upon a time, live music thrived on its immediacy and the fleeting connection between the performer and the audience. But in an age when thousands of concertgoers upload clips in real time (and platforms explicitly encourage that behavior), that ephemerality is blunted.

Or, to put it another way, if a thorough selection of clips from Bieber’s Coachella set can be found on YouTube, what are the live attendees really paying for? Has live music become just another piece of content, indistinguishable from the rest of your feed? “Bieber not only singing along to younger videos of himself, but also laughing at viral clips of himself running into glass doors, falling off stages, or creating memes that would go on to inspire today’s cultural lexicon, was beyond fitting for an artist shaped by the internet as much as he has been,” reads a Slate review.

Maybe Bieber just needed a little break in the middle of his set. No matter the reason why he pulled up YouTube, the decision resonated with many. Many musicians design their live shows to be marketable on short-form platforms, but Bieber went one step further. He brought the short-form world directly to his fans.