It’s 2010 and Justin Bieber is quickly becoming the most famous kid on Earth. He’s 15 years old, grinning on red carpets, charming every talk show host in sight, selling out arenas before he even drops an album. He’s not just a pop star, he’s the most Googled celebrity on the internet.
He was so big that they invented a word to describe just how crazy kids would act, getting panic attacks, passing out, screaming just from being near him. Bieber fever was a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. But now, 15 years later, a new video starts circulating online. Justin stands by the beach, hunched over in a hoodie, looking tired and exhausted as he’s surrounded by paparazzi with their phones in his face, recording his every move.
He yells at them, but instead of recognizing his cries for help, the whole world laughs. But it’s not funny, it’s haunting. Okay, maybe it was a little funny. It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, is it? But when you take a closer look at how Justin Bieber became this shell of his former self, the story that presents itself is worse than tragic.
It’s a story about how ever since the beginning of his career, his own life was never his. It’s a story about how behind the smiling interviews, the record sales, the huge concerts, there was a pipeline of exploitation with everyone around him constantly asking for more, more, more until it broke him.
This is the story about how one of the biggest pop stars of all time, an insanely talented kid who was born to make music, had his life stolen by the managers, the executives, the so-called mentors who saw him as a product and not a person. And in the end, after they made billions, he was left for dead as they all moved on.
And now, even after he’s given everything he had to give, the world still won’t let him rest. I’m Philip, this is Volksgeist, and you’re watching the insane true story of how Justin Bieber became arguably the darkest cautionary tale about the evils of fame in the 21st century. On March 1st, 1994, a baby named Justin Drew Bieber was born at St.
Joseph’s Hospital in London. Not London, England though, but Canadian London, a small city in Ontario that sits on the flat plains between Detroit and Toronto. And Canadian London just isn’t known as the most amazing place to live or grow up. In fact, it’s mostly known for having a slower-paced lifestyle with a drug, crime, and homelessness problem, and not a lot of higher-paying jobs available for its residents.
It’s the kind of place where the odds might be stacked against you if you grow up there. And Justin’s arrival into the world was no different because there was a struggle within his family that would define his early life before he was even born. His mother and father, Pattie Mallette and Jeremy Bieber, were just 18 and 19 years old.
But even from the very moment he was born, his parents weren’t there together the moment. Instead, his father was sitting in a jail cell after being arrested for fighting in public. But that wasn’t the only problem they were going through. Pattie had been dealing with hardship for a long time. She had been a victim of sexual abuse, she had dealt with depression, and as a teenager, she even attempted to take her own life by stepping in front of a moving truck.
It was only after surviving her attempt that she found the strength to keep going. But of course, that doesn’t mean that everything was going to be easy. At first, Pattie spent time living in a parental care center, a program to help young mothers learn how to raise their kids with support, education, and resources.
Eventually, they moved out on their own and Pattie got a mother’s allowance, a Canadian welfare program that gave her around $9,000 a year to help pay living expenses. But of course, that wouldn’t be nearly enough for her to scrape by on, and she still had to work hard to provide for her son. Meanwhile, they weren’t getting much help from his dad, either.
Jeremy Bieber was arrested multiple times when Justin was a kid on charges like assault, causing bodily harm, and more, spending months at a time in jail while the mother of his kids struggled to provide for their son. At one point, for a brief moment, Jeremy tried to come back into Justin and his mother’s lives.
He entered rehab, he proposed to Pattie saying that he wanted to make things right, but that didn’t last very long. And eventually, coming home drunk, he confessed to cheating on her. From that point on, Justin was raised primarily by his single mother and his grandparents. At one point, a kind neighbor would even help pay for Justin’s daycare, which finally gave Pattie the space to complete her GED after she hadn’t finished high school.
Later on, she would enroll in an online college and even get a college degree, which finally helped her get a job that would put them in a house of their own. And so, Justin would grow up at 288 Willow Street in Stratford, Ontario, an even smaller but much safer town near London, where Pattie would dedicate her life into raising her son the best way she possibly could.
Although neither of them could have ever imagined how dramatically their lives were about to change. Justin Bieber was a lot like any other kid growing up in Southern Ontario in the late ’90s and the early 2000s. He went through a French immersion program at school, he loved sports, ice hockey and soccer being two of his favorites, and overall, he was a kid with lots of interests and a high-achieving energy even at a young age.
But from the very beginning of his childhood, it was obvious to his family that Justin had a natural affinity for rhythm and sound. There’s even a home video from when Justin was just 2 years old that shows him drumming on the side of a kitchen chair with surprisingly advanced timing for a toddler. You want to be a drummer when you grow up? And no, that’s not a joke.
Justin’s sense of rhythm, even as a toddler, demonstrates a high level of limb independence, the ability to control all of your limbs at the same time for different patterns, like a drummer playing a swing on the ride cymbal while working the hi-hat with one foot and the bass drum with the other. And for most musicians, this is a skill that would take several years of consistent, focused practice to actually build a solid foundation with.
But Justin Bieber was doing it without ever being told how. And then, when he was four, Pattie bought Justin a small djembe drum, a traditional West African instrument that he would play obsessively, sparking within him a growing passion for music. Dear Justin. What is it? Okay, now what do you do with it? He never had any lessons or anything.
Soon he was teaching himself guitar, picking up melodies by ear, and developing his singing voice without ever having had any formal training. Music was becoming his primary, number one interest, something that it seemed like he might have been born to do. Eventually, Pattie started driving Justin 2 hours out to the big city of Toronto to play the djembe drums in public.
And that’s where he had his first ever public performance on Speakers’ Corner, a tiny talent showcase on Toronto TV, where people could step into a recording booth and get a few minutes to do their thing. Justin brought his drum, and the story goes that he drew a small crowd of onlookers, one of the first signs that his family realized he really might have something special.
But regular trips to Toronto were too expensive for Pattie. And so, Justin started playing music in public in the small downtown area of Stratford instead. He became a busker, a street performer, posting up with his guitar and djembe and playing and singing for anyone who passed by. Justin was a natural at capturing people’s attention.
People just couldn’t help themselves from stopping to watch this little kid, only 10 years old, playing like he had 20 years of practice. His mother remembered how it went that summer, saying that that summer Justin opened his guitar case and started busking in front of a Stratford theater. He earned nearly $3,000.
We went on our first vacation ever to Disneyland. When he turned 13 years old, he was able to compete in Stratford Idol, a local talent competition for teenagers, being by far the youngest contestant. But week after week, he performed with confidence, hyping up the crowd, and showing off a vocal range with maturity far beyond his age.
Pattie had been recording every moment of the competition, and one day, Justin asked her if they could post the videos on YouTube so far-away family members could watch on the computer. And so, she ended up uploading every performance so people who couldn’t attend in person could watch online. And when she did that, she unintentionally changed the entire course of her son’s life forever.
It was deep in the winter of 2007, and all they had was a couple of grainy, low-res, backlit videos of Justin in a barely visible shirt and tie singing R&B in the basement of a community center somewhere in Stratford, Ontario. But it wouldn’t be long before the entire world knew his name.
Justin ultimately finished in second place for the Teen Idol competition, losing to Kristen Holly, a local country singer who was just a couple years older. To our next Stratford Star winner, which this year is Kristen Holly. And even though he was devastated at the time, him losing might have ultimately helped set everything in motion, anyway.
YouTube at the time had only been around for about 2 years. It wasn’t the global powerhouse it is today. It was the era of Charlie bit my finger being the first ever viral video with just a million views. But Justin’s mom kept uploading, and eventually, the Justin Bieber channel began to take off in a way that no one expected.
His unpolished, yet kind of brilliant covers of R&B classics started racking up hundreds of comments out of nowhere. These were videos recorded by his mother and just uploaded for family members to watch. Reaching a worldwide audience was something that they didn’t even imagine was a possibility. But Justin was unknowingly building one of the first truly online social media fan bases in the music industry’s history.
His mother managed the account all by herself, posting the videos, replying to comments, monitoring the page, and it was more attention than they ever could have imagined. They were unintentionally creating a new blueprint for every entertainer that would come after him. And eventually, even the music industry started to notice.
Labels, producers, managers, they were flooding her inbox interested in Justin’s talent. But at first, Pattie’s intuition was to be deeply skeptical of their intentions. She would later say, “It was strange. I was used to having an inbox full of messages from fans commenting on how cute my kid was and how much they loved him.
And as it was, I couldn’t even keep up with those comments, so I didn’t. But then, I really didn’t want him near the entertainment path. I figured that all the people who started hounding us were determined only to turn Justin into a cash cow to fill their pockets because I thought that’s how the music business worked. So, thanks, but no thanks.
We’re not interested.” And so, eventually, she started simply ignoring everyone that was trying to get in contact with her to put Justin into music. But there was one man who refused to take no for an answer, and his name was Scooter Braun. Scooter was only 26 years old, but he had already worked in the past as a party planner for artists like Britney Spears and Eminem, and he also helped broker marketing and endorsement deals for artists like Ludacris.
And so, after stumbling across Justin’s videos completely by accident while searching for something else on YouTube, Scooter became obsessed with finding the kid that was behind the insane voice in these videos. People freaking out about the Jonas Brothers. These kids are losing their mind, but I’m not necessarily a fan of the music.
Um so, I thought, “Man, there needs to be a kid who sings great angelic songs the way Michael Jackson did, because that angelic voice will make you believe in love again before you got jaded.” So, I had this idea of who that kid was, and that’s when I saw Justin. I’m like, “That’s the kid.” We saw him just on YouTube. Yeah.
Middle of the night. I went on to consult. I was making extra money consulting other people. I was consulting Akon on another artist, and I clicked on Justin’s video by mistake, and I was like, “That’s the kid.” And he would end up going to extraordinary lengths to track down Justin and his mom after realizing she wasn’t responding to any of his initial attempts.
He even tracked down the name of the theater in Stratford where Justin had been busking. Then, he dug through local school board contacts and community archives to find neighbors and acquaintances in the hopes of finding a way to contact Patty and talk about Justin’s abilities. And eventually, Scooter Braun did get through. Despite having already decided that she wanted nothing to do with the managers and the agents knocking on her door, Patty was struck by his persistence, and perhaps more importantly, what he offered.
All Scooter said was that he would love to fly out her and Justin to Atlanta to meet with him and Usher in person. Maybe help Justin record some demos and show them what the industry was really like. No strings attached, just introducing a talented kid to some interesting people. And she was still hesitant, but she decided to tell her son about the opportunity anyway.
She said, “I looked at my just barely a teenager son. I doubted that he could understand the magnitude of what I would be asking him. I doubted that he understood the sacrifices it would require. I doubted that he understood that this wasn’t a joke, something we could afford to take lightly, like picking up a new hobby or deciding which pair of soccer cleats to buy.
I closed my eyes, almost hoping that he wouldn’t be interested so we could call it a day. But, Justin didn’t say no. His eyes lit up, and he asked, ‘When do we get to go?'” For Justin, it would be one of his first times on an airplane, and one of the only times he had ever left Stratford. In Atlanta, Justin stayed in Scooter Braun’s penthouse.
He recorded demo tracks at a studio, and he got to have a real glimpse at what life in the music industry might be like. The story goes that when Justin and Scooter met face-to-face, their connection was instant. They got along easily, and Justin was excited. But, Patty would later say that she wasn’t fully convinced that having him sign to a major label at 13 years old was even a good idea at all.
And the trip ended with no contract signed. But, Scooter didn’t go away. He maintained a constant line of contact, and a few months later, in February of 2008, Justin met with two of his musical idols at the same time, Usher and Justin Timberlake, as part of a final decision on who he might sign with.
And Justin Timberlake made some really high bids to work with Bieber, but eventually, he dropped his negotiations with concerns that it might be confusing for two people with the same name to be working closely together on a label. But, with such accomplished and trusted big names in the industry wanting to sign their son, it seemed stupid to turn down an opportunity that might change their family’s life forever.
And so, at the start of 2008, Usher, a former teen star himself, signed a 13-year-old Justin Bieber to a new company called RBMG as part of a joint venture between himself and Scooter Braun, creating one of the industry’s next big stars in the process. And so, after a few months of having Justin under their wing, Usher and Scooter Braun were able to connect him with L.A.
Reid, the man famous for discovering Outkast and TLC. And L.A. Reid ended up signing Justin to a 360 deal with Island Records at the age of 13. And now, things could really take off. And shortly after that, his mother moved them to Atlanta so he could work on music full-time. And now, being officially in the major label system, Justin’s career began almost immediately.
His debut single, “One Time”, would drop at the start of 2009 after a couple months of recording and preparation. It was an R&B and pop crossover written by veteran writer Tricky Stewart, the same guy behind Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” and Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed”. And the reception to Justin’s early work was pretty insane. His first song ended up peaking at number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US and number 12 in Canada, a pretty insane feat for an artist’s first ever release.
Before long, it was even certified platinum in multiple countries. Later that year, on October 6th, he dropped “One Less Lonely Girl”, another pop R&B song that hit the charts like crazy. When that song peaked at number 16 in America, it started to look like Scooter’s hunch was right. Justin Bieber was born to be a star. And then, when they sent him out on the typical new artist PR interview circuit, things went better than they could have ever imagined.
Because Scooter might have discovered Justin on YouTube, but he wasn’t alone. Justin’s online fan base was already an insanely powerful force on a level that the music industry hadn’t really seen before. In a lot of ways, he kind of created the blueprint for the social media following to mainstream stardom pipe dream that’s still the method for most entertainers to this day.
His early fans, they were the first stans. These kids were obsessed. In fact, the story goes that it was thanks to the engagement from his followers that Justin was even able to get so many interviews and shows to begin with. When he went on Ellen DeGeneres for the first time in the summer of 2009, the caption read, “Ellen’s Twitter followers convinced her to invite a brand new musician to the show, Justin Bieber.
Check out this superstar’s first interview.” Within that first year, he put out two more singles, “Love Me” and “Favorite Girl”, and those also did well enough that he actually ended up becoming the first artist to ever have four singles in the top 40 of the Hot 100 before putting out a debut album.
And this was all at the age of 15. Justin Bieber got so big in that first year of putting out singles that he was even invited to sing at the 2010 White House Easter celebration in front of the president and the first lady. And if that’s not enough, you can go over to the music stage and just have some fun with Justin Bieber. And they had done all of this without him even having an album out, just that 20-minute-long six-track EP, “My World”.
It was short, but the talent was undeniable. “My World” would be certified platinum in under 50 days, and at the age of 15, Justin was charting above Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, and Michael Jackson. The Sun would write, “Bieber’s voice has this undeniable soul quality to it, and he has great control as well.
He croons up and down the scales effortlessly.” And so, in early 2010, Justin Bieber was on the verge of becoming the most popular artist in the world. He was about to turn 16, but they were already getting ready to release his debut album, the era-defining “My World 2.0”, that would make him the youngest solo male artist to top the Billboard charts in 50 years.
But, fame isn’t free. Someone will always have to pay the price of fame and fortune with blood, sweat, and tears. And already, even before the peak of his popularity had come, even before he was old enough to drive, Justin Bieber was about to find out just how heavy the burden of his incredible success could be. Justin was a natural entertainer.
He always had been. Back on the streets of Stratford, Ontario, when he was busking in front of that little theater in his quaint hometown, you can even hear a lady say, “This kid should be famous” in the background of one of his videos. And then, suddenly, he was. Because he and his team essentially weaponized his appeal to make him huge. He had it all.
Adults thought he was charming, little kids were obsessed with him. He was unusually charismatic for a young child. age when most teenagers would be covered in acne, hiding in their rooms, he was up on stages performing with a confidence like he’d been doing it his whole life. But, hindsight is 20/20. In 2010, it wouldn’t have been easily possible to see what Justin was sacrificing during his rise to stardom.
But, looking back now, it’s almost painfully obvious that even in the early years, the fame almost immediately brought a level of struggle to his life. He did a GQ interview many years later in 2021, where he talks about how exactly he felt about the attention on him back then. He tells a story about a trip he took back to Toronto not long after he signed his first recording contract, when he was still a kid, but already exhausted by what success was asking of him.
He says, “I was working so much as this young kid that I got really sad, and I missed my friends, and I missed my normal life. And so, me and my friend hid my passport. The record label was freaking out, saying, ‘You have to do the Today show this week, and you can’t find your passport.’ And takes a certain amount of time to get a new one.
But, I was just going to do anything to be able to be normal at that time. So, we hid the passport, but then he ended up confessing that he had the passport, and everyone was concerned, and they asked him if he was okay. But, then he went straight back into the machine. He did the Today show like he was supposed to.
‘I had this dream to become the biggest superstar in the world,’ Bieber says now. But, he was just beginning to find out what accomplishing that dream might mean, or what it might cost him. At the same time, the reactions from his fans intensified quicker than ever before. In one video, Bieber is seen attempting to leave a concert venue as hundreds of fans surround his car, shouting and crowding the area.
Bieber fever became this crazy once-in-a-generation phenomenon. It wasn’t just about the music, though. It was hysteria, a cultural moment, something bigger than pop music. Crowds shut down entire city blocks just to catch a glimpse of Bieber. At 15 years old, he wasn’t famous, he was a global obsession.
One quote talks about Bieber’s mindset through all of this. He said, “The harder you work, the more successful you can be. This is just the beginning for me.” The reporter asked how he defined success, and he grew up with not a lot of money. We never owned a house. I want to buy my mom a house.” But, it’s not a surprise that cracks started to show through the facade even in the early days, even when everything was still shiny and new and growing so fast.
Sure, Justin was a natural-born performer. He was really good at it, he loved it, he enjoyed it. But, he was also a kid, a kid that was working literally all the time. In 2011, when he was still 16 years old, less than a year after “Baby” had come out and made him a household name, he said to Vanity Fair, “It’s really hard to balance myself.
A regular kid, if he gets the flu, he can just go home. But, I can’t do that. Everything is important, and I know that I have to give up a lot of myself, a lot of my private life.” There’s one interview in particular that he gave from around that time where he says something that kind of sounds like the words of a young kid with a deeper about what he was going through at the time.
He said, “I’m not normal. I think differently, and my mind is always racing. I’m just kind of nuts, but I think the best musicians probably always are.” And yeah, on the surface, that sounds kind of corny or maybe even narcissistic for a little kid with millions of fans to say, but in reality, what he was thinking about was a lot more serious than most other 16-year-olds in the world.
Because later in that same interview, he would reveal exactly what was on his mind so much at the time. He said, “I think there are people that are waiting for the time I make a mistake, and they’re going to jump on it. They’re going to be haters. I know I’m not going to make a life-changing bad decision as some people before me have because I’ve seen it happen too many times.
I could be my own worst enemy, but I don’t want to mess this up.” And all of this was around late 2009, early 2010. At a time when Justin Bieber couldn’t have possibly known that he was basically predicting his own future, for better and for worse. When they dropped Baby in January of 2010 as the lead single for his debut album, Justin went from a rising teen idol to a full-blown global superstar with a household name.
The song Baby wasn’t hugely different from anything he had made before. As usual, it was an R&B-flavored pop song written with help from Tricky Stewart and The Dream. It got good reviews. Critics thought it had a great chorus and a nice urban mainstream crossover with a feature from Ludacris. It was nothing truly out of the ordinary versus what he had already released.
But within a few weeks of the song’s release, right around the time he turned 16, he became the second most Googled artist worldwide, behind only Lady Gaga. The song’s shelf life would be crazy. After 6 months, the music video for Baby was the most viewed video in YouTube history, a record it would hold for almost 3 years.
To say the least, Scooter Braun’s plan to make Justin a star had worked well. Maybe, looking back now and seeing where all of this would lead, the plan had worked a little bit too well. Because at the same time, it also became the most disliked video on the entire platform just as quickly, with more than 12 million thumbs down.
Justin’s first full-length project, My World 2.0, was a massive success. It made him the youngest male artist to debut at number one on the Billboard charts since Stevie Wonder in 1963. And the album was actually pretty good. The mixture of mainstream teen pop and radio-friendly R&B, it complements Justin’s young vocals really well, and the contents of the songs are romantic without being sexual.
It’s friendly, it’s innocent, and it sounds good. It’s definitely aimed at younger people, but they did that without sacrificing the quality of the music. Songs like Runaway Love and U Smile, they still hold up today. But before long, the attention around Justin became a frantic spectacle to the point of his actual music being glossed over as an afterthought compared to the absurd level of obsession around everything he was doing.
Basically, the media made a spectacle out of him before he even had the chance to make the mistakes he was talking about being afraid of. Because many of the radio or TV personalities who interviewed Justin on his rise to fame, they acted in ways that when you look back at it, were inappropriate, invasive, and sometimes even downright predatory.
Has your Has your mom given you the sex talk yet? I mean, like I I really like I really don’t want to have that conversation with my mother. Yeah. Like I’m I’ve kind of had it with my with my father. to hear Oh, really? See, my parents My parents never gave me the sex talk. Okay. So, why don’t you give me the sex talk? I I really I feel uncomfortable right now. AW.
WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THE SEX talk from a 15-year-old boy? That’s pretty weird. Let’s talk about the album. Essentially, nothing in Justin Bieber’s early music warranted this type of attention from people in the media, especially towards a kid who was still under 16 years old, too young to even drive. But it only became a bigger problem as time went on.
But this wasn’t just something that was happening on random local radio shows. One time on The Talk, a CBS show that aired on national television for 15 years, Justin was treated even worse. Would you rather be have to be naked on stage during one full song one full song or drink a cup of blended worms? Answer, Justin Bieber.
I have like little girl fans. I can’t go Okay, IMAGINE THAT. I WOULD SQUEEZE YOUR FACE. NO. NO. I squeeze your face. If you had to date one of us five HAD TO WHO WOULD WHO WOULD IT BE? She would be a pain in the butt, I’ll tell you that right now. Even something as seemingly harmless as Rihanna kissing him on 106 & Park, a 23-year-old woman kissing a 15-year-old boy on national TV, TWO PIMP STATUS. I LOVE IT.
IT feels deeply off in hindsight. It wasn’t a crime, but it was emblematic of how the industry treated him, not as a kid, but as a product. When you factor in how the media was already sexualizing, mocking, and exploiting him, it stopped seeming innocent and starts to look like a symptom of a much bigger issue.
This wasn’t just during interviews, either. At the 2012 American Music Awards ceremony, when he was 16 years old, presenter Jenny McCarthy, who was 40 years old at the time, started grabbing him by the neck, kissing him, and touching him completely out of nowhere in front of thousands of people in the audience and millions on TV.
His reaction, which was to go up to a microphone and say, “I feel violated right now,” was met not with sympathy, but with screaming laughter. I feel violated right now. Wow. And that wasn’t the only time when you can see the discomfort on his face from the disgusting things that people would say to him on camera.
Listening to Megan, you smell amazing. How old are you? Uh thank you. How old are you? Wow, look at your eyes. Um uh what music do you listen to at the moment, Justin? Thank you so much. Look at him. Look at What a beautiful face. All right. It’s disturbing to realize that media personalities acting this way toward Justin Bieber wasn’t really recognized as problematic back then.
took the opportunity in the window, considering I’ll never get to do it again, and kind of molested him. I want some Bieber fever, and I want a Bieber rash. I want it all. Give me that cougar But when you see how he was talked about in the public eye, it’s suddenly a lot less shocking that he would eventually start reacting that way.
But what’s even worse is the monster it created. When you have adults who don’t consume his media, don’t listen to his music, only watching him through the lens of mainstream TV or radio, it created this perception that he wasn’t a real person, but really just a punchline to be laughed at. Not only was his life going to be impacted by the workload, the travel, the constant pressure to perform, but he was also going to be punished just for doing his job at the same time.
Sometimes it was just internet rant videos talking about how cringe his hair or his music was. I don’t love Justin Bieber. I hate Justin Bieber. I h a t e Justin Bieber. Some people didn’t like hearing his songs on the radio every day, but over time, it became a disturbing obsession. At one point in 2012, an obsessive fan in New Mexico made national news after being caught by authorities while planning to murder and castrate Justin Bieber.
But it wasn’t because of anything particularly controversial he had done. It was because of who he was, a 15-year-old boy at the center of a global teen phenomenon. The way that he was treated on the internet was particularly horrible, and nowhere was this more apparent than on 4chan, the message board that helped define early internet culture.
And people there launched a viral campaign to send Justin to North Korea, obviously a cruel joke, but it picked up a half a million signatures on a petition. Other people spread false rumors that he had syphilis. They hacked his YouTube channel to show a fake death announcement. They replaced his Last.fm page with pornographic images.
For a kid who was just good at singing pop songs, the internet turned his adolescence into a public humiliation ritual. But the backlash wasn’t just confined to online trolls. At one point at a basketball game at Madison Square Garden in 2010, the Jumbotron camera cut to Justin. Instead of the usual applause that celebrities might receive, he was met with a wave of boos while his own song, Baby, blared through the stadium.
Some kids in the crowd were cheering, but they were easily drowned out by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of adults booing a 15-year-old kid. Here they have cheers, have boos. Here at the Garden because they just put up Justin Bieber on the big screen there. You hear the crowd. So, why would you boo the kid? The boos are from the guys, and the cheers are from the girls.
This is a teenager enduring the kind of public humiliation that would break most adults, and it was for no reason in particular at all. But despite the storm of negative media attention around Justin, one thing was for sure when the dust settled from My World 2.0. Like him or not, he was now the biggest male artist in the world after just one album cycle.
But still, the scale of Bieber’s next leap in popularity would surpass the whole world’s expectations, both for people who hated him and loved him. The first official tour he went out on was a massive arena tour that would go on for almost a year and a half with more than 125 shows. And at first, it was unreal. A brand new artist with a giant hit song, and he’s already selling out huge arenas.
Baby had only been out for 6 months, and he was performing in Malaysia, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Singapore, Ireland. His first ever tour had shows on five continents. It was insane. Even more wild was that it wasn’t a lip-synced, choreographed pop routine. He was performing live every night with a full band or even by himself with just a guitar in front of thousands of people at a time, back-to-back, every 3 days, city after city, country after country, for over a year.
But when the extremely demanding tour schedule started to take a toll, his voice began to show signs of strain, and the dream-come-true moments he had imagined since childhood began to feel like a burden. What? What? You tell me. On a scale of to 10. Seven. Minus three. Was not a four. Justin needs rest. I mean, that’s really our best friend at this point.
My voice sounded good couple of them. Hearing your voice sounds now, he’s giving it everything he’s got. But doing 86 shows for any vocalist is a lot to ask. And this was the moment when the dream started to blur into something darker, where the demands of fame began to outweigh the joy of performing. But at the same time, there was no chance of slowing down.
Justin was still just a kid, but the industry had already decided he was going to be a machine. At this point, Justin was so famous that the paparazzi would chase him down the highway in LA at 100 miles an hour just to get a photo of him while he was calling the cops to beg for help. News broadcasts would report he sounded more like a scared teenager than a mega pop star, without realizing at all just how poignant their comments would later become. Hello.
Um I have like five cars following me. It sounds like the scared voice of a teenager, hardly the voice of a mega pop star. Do you know the people that are following you? No, I don’t. Or if they’re driving really reckless, they just will not stop following me. By 2012, Justin had been under a microscope with no breaks for years straight.
At this point, the strain started to show. During a trip to London, he lashed out at paparazzi who were following him relentlessly, yelling at them, cursing at them, and nearly getting violent as they insulted him from a distance. What the [ __ ] you say? You old washed up, man. What did you say? YOU OLD WASHED UP, [ __ ] YOU.
But the issue was, no matter how much stress he was dealing with at this moment, no matter how overwhelming his career had become, taking a minute or slowing down was not an option for Justin Bieber. We have to remember that Justin Bieber wasn’t the only person making money from his career. For the people around him, he was a golden goose.
He had become a massively profitable asset, and that’s a pretty key part of the pop star business that I think most people forget about. Chris Hicks, who was executive vice president at his label back then, spoke openly about the financial strategy behind Justin’s career. He said, “So many artists have internet traction, but can’t attach it to anything and make money.
We monetized every corner of my world. Every record we released charted.” For the label executives, Justin’s career was a big investment that needed to make a profit, and it did. The tour for the first album grossed $50 million. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people who were all making money off Justin’s popularity.
The machine that forms around a superstar like this, managers, promoters, engineers, merch companies, label assistants, brand deals, media coverage, tour assistants, people working security at the door, when it gets big enough, it becomes very difficult to turn it off. At this point in his career, Justin Bieber was essentially, from a business standpoint, a franchise, a product, the same way a Marvel movie or a TV series would be, and he was making a comparable amount of money. Justin Bieber was a business.
Basically, even if he was starting to show the early signs of being burned out or tired or needing to slow down, he was too big to stop and acknowledge it. And that’s exactly one of the factors that’s destroyed many artists’ lives or even killed them over the years. Amy Winehouse would play shows completely blacked out on liquor, and no one on her team would cancel the concerts or get her help. It ended up killing her.
Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, there are countless examples of people who have ended up losing everything or worse when the toll of fame became too heavy to bear. But still, the scale of Bieber’s next leap in popularity was about to surpass anyone’s wildest expectations for just how big he would get.
Because in late 2011, when he was still 17 years old, a new era began. He still had a boyish voice, he was still pretty fresh-faced, but to signal his new, more mature style, he got rid of the bowl cut that defined his look for the last couple of years. Look at this hair, it’s going to be gone. He didn’t want to do it. I’m making him.
She’s making me. She’s making Basically, Justin Bieber was no longer a kid. And when they dropped his new single, Boyfriend, just 3 weeks after his 18th birthday, it broke the record for the second highest ever debut digital sales week for any single, debuting at number two on the Billboard charts, even though it was available for purchase only on the iTunes digital store and literally nowhere else.
To signify his new, more mature persona, his next album, Believe, would leave behind the teen pop sound for heavier R&B production from artists like Max Martin, Diplo, and Hit-Boy. The latter of which has been known for creating hits for artists like Kanye and Drake. And with songs like As Long As You Love Me, Boyfriend, and Beauty and a Beat, the album did have a more adult, maybe even sultry sound.
Not that it was at all inappropriate, still being pretty wholesome, but it definitely wasn’t designed for kids the way that his last album had been. And it sold almost 100,000 more copies in its first week compared to My World 2.0. He may have been embarking on a new era, but he was still even bigger than ever before. After Believe debuted at number one in over 30 countries, they released Believe Acoustic, which did the same, making Bieber the first artist to ever release five number one albums before the age of 19. He had the most followed account on
Twitter. He was still the most searched male artist alive. And the tour he would go out on for the album grossed over $200 million with 150 shows around the world. Over 100 of the stadium shows sold out in minutes. At this point, the level he was on was insane. They were selling out arenas in Chile, Guatemala, China, South Africa, Russia.
It was unbelievable just how internationally loved this kid was. They were making enough revenue to fund a Hollywood movie just off the work of one teenager singing and dancing around the world. In London, they did four days in a row at the O2 Arena for a total of $5 million in sales. But on the third day of his London shows, toward the end of the concert, while they were performing the chorus for Beauty and a Beat, Justin stopped dancing and singing, kind of stumbled forward to put his hands on his knees, and then slowly walked backstage without a word. When
reports came out, it turned out that he had become lightheaded while dancing and even ended up losing consciousness completely once he got backstage. But the show went on, and after a 20-minute break to get oxygen, he ended up finishing the set list and even went on to do the final London show the next day with no delays.
But it didn’t stop just at a moment of exhaustion during the long tour. These small hiccups were just the beginning. And what no one could have predicted, despite all the signs, was just how drastically his image was about to unravel as the pressure that had been building since he was 13 years old finally reached a breaking point.
As far back as 2009, Justin had predicted that he would face more and more scrutiny as his career got bigger. Of course, I think that there are people waiting for the time when I make a mistake and they’re going to jump on it. I could be my own worst enemy, but I don’t want to mess this up. And while the Believe Tour represented an even crazier peak in Justin’s worldwide popularity than the already insane My World era, offstage, at the exact same time, his image started to shatter in a way that would change not
just how the outside world saw him, but the trajectory of his life. Even when he was just a little kid with a high voice and a bowl cut, the media had done everything in their power to create a spectacle out of him. But even if the hatred he had been a target of before was unwarranted and bizarrely zealous, in some strange way, it started becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But now, his breakdown wasn’t a gradual decline. It was a lot more like a rapid spiral out of control throughout 2013 and 14 that almost destroyed his career and took his public image from wholesome, likable young kid to a punching bag that was seen as narcissistic and was widely hated. But if they had hated him for no reason before, now they would have more than enough justifications to hate him forever.
Every week, it was something new. Sometimes it was nothing more than antics. He egged his neighbor’s house. He showed up late to concerts. At one point, he visited the Anne Frank Museum only to say, “Hopefully she would have been a Belieber.” As if only she hadn’t died at age 15 in a Nazi prison camp. It didn’t stop there.
The day after he fainted on stage in London, he got into a fight with paparazzi and slapped a camera out of one of their hands while yelling insults. That was around the same time that he was detained in Germany for bringing his pet monkey into the country illegally, only to end up abandoning it there instead of fixing the paperwork.
This was also around the same time he made international headlines for peeing in a mop bucket at a New York nightclub while screaming [ __ ] Bill Clinton. WHAT KIDS? WHAT KIDS IS THIS? BECAUSE THEN CAME THE CRIMINAL CHARGES. In January of 2014, not long after he was about to turn 20 years old, he’s caught drag racing a yellow Lamborghini on a residential street at double the speed limit.
While being arrested, he acknowledges that he had been drinking, smoking weed, and taking prescription medication right before the incident. The mug shot became one of the most iconic images of his career. And not long after that, he was accused of reckless driving in his hometown after crashing and altering vehicle into a minivan.
A few months later, he surrendered himself to Toronto police after being accused of repeatedly punching a limousine driver in the back of the head and leaving the scene before authorities arrived. That was the same time that he was ejected from the ancient Mayan archaeological site in Tulum, Mexico after being caught climbing on the ruins of buildings.
Worst of all, in 2014, were the two videos that surfaced of him saying racial slurs and telling racist jokes. These two videos were the most damning of all, and understandably, they practically ended his career. His image was trashed. The controversy was so widely publicized that he was banned from setting foot in mainland China with government authorities writing, “As far as we’re concerned, he’s engaged in a series of bad behaviors in his social life and during previous performances in China, which caused discontent among the
public.” He was still the most searched and most discussed artist in the world, but the spectacle was bigger than ever before, and even his biggest fans were having a hard time defending his character. So why did Justin Bieber suddenly go from a happy, entertaining kid to a seemingly narcissistic [ __ ] teenager? Either the money had gone to his head, or something was wrong behind the scenes.
But when all that was visible was someone with nearly infinite money and fame around the world, everyone forgot to ask what was really going on. No one honestly cared. But all of this didn’t happen in a vacuum. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Justin started out as what seemed like a pretty sweet kid and ended up looking like a giant piece of [ __ ] after a couple years in the spotlight.
And obviously, look, everyone loves to hate celebrities. You can’t blame them. They’re rich, they’re out of touch, they’re egotistical, superficial. I could go on for a long time. There aren’t a lot of compelling reasons why we should have empathy for any rich people at all. But you have to remember, the story I’m telling right now isn’t the story that was visible about Justin Bieber 10 or 12 years ago.
Back then, ripping him to shreds was pretty acceptable. I did it. You probably did it. But when we look back and see what he was going through, it paints the picture of a kid whose humanity was sacrificed for money, all while the whole world thought he was just another spoiled celebrity who had it too easy and didn’t see past the fame and money for even a second.
Whatever was going on, it was pretty clear to the entire world that Justin Bieber was no longer the cute, sweet, singing kid he once was. But of course, with the machine around him being so big and so powerful, there wasn’t really any controversy that could truly end his career. With so much money and promotional power behind him.
And so in the end, they only leveraged the controversy he had been stuck in the middle of for over a year in a move that just made him bigger than ever before. Justin Bieber’s fourth studio album, Purpose, debuted in 2015 with 650,000 units sold in its first week, by far the highest first week sales of any project he already had released or would ever release.
But of course, people wanted to know exactly what he would say for himself after being at the center of so much controversy for two years straight. Would he have an answer? Would he have an explanation? Would he redeem himself? The songs on Purpose focused on inspirational, uplifting themes. Bieber talked about the album’s title and concept coming from him losing his purpose and then finding it again in the last couple years of his career.
And of course, the rebrand to sincerity and positivity, the comeback from his scandals, it was a massive success. Critics would say things like, “After a string of mishaps, Bieber returns with an album worthy of forgiveness.” With Purpose, Justin’s music became more pervasive and difficult to avoid than ever.
It produced three number one singles, What Do You Mean, Sorry, and Love Yourself. There are multiple songs from this album that are on the list of the most streamed Spotify songs ever. This album is six times platinum. Its production was handled mainly by people like Skrillex, Diplo, Benny Blanco, and others who curated an EDM dance pop sound that made it one of the most iconic sounding pop albums of the decade.
Even though Justin didn’t really directly explain or apologize for most of what he had done to become such a villain in the media, Purpose was such success that most people kind of forgot about it anyway. Sure, most of the world might have branded him as a giant [ __ ] but how much does that really matter when his music is suddenly everywhere, all over the place again? With Purpose being Justin’s most insanely big era yet, the tour also had to be huge.
It was the biggest album he ever dropped, and sure enough, the tour was also going to have a grueling schedule that even a lot of seasoned artists wouldn’t attempt. Justin was set to perform 162 shows in one year. In a way, it was business as usual. Bieber was a touring monster at this point. He could hop from country to country week after week and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales, selling out arenas over and over and over.
Even after so much controversy, he was still too big to fail. But then, in the middle of 2017, when they were moving into the last leg of the tour, which had already grossed a quarter of a billion dollars, the remaining 14 shows were canceled with almost no warning. The massive amount of logistics, manpower, and money that was needed to keep the tour moving stopped short. Something had cracked.
But Justin’s statement about why was pretty purposefully vague. He wrote in a short statement that he needed to prioritize his well-being and that he wanted things to be sustainable. Many artists, including John Mayer, would defend him, saying things like, “We’ve lost many great artists lately. I give Justin the thumbs up for realizing it was time to call it.
” It seemed like he had finally run out of energy, physically and mentally. And this time, there was nothing that could be done to push him further. After eight years of constantly being under pressure to perform, record, and play his part, he needed a break. In those five years between Purpose and Changes, he would go multiple years without performing in public at all.
His first live performance after canceling the Purpose tour was Coachella almost three years later. And while he wasn’t completely gone from releasing music during this time, he mostly did a couple features and not much else. It definitely gave off the sense that his silence was much needed for his own health and sanity. The first thing Justin did after his five-year break from releasing music after Purpose, before dropping another album, was to make a documentary covering why exactly he had taken a break to begin with. And it was more
than just some fluffy PR piece. It was a real, detailed look into Justin rebuilding his life after the pressures of fame almost killed him. As humans, we go through so many ups and downs, so many good seasons and bad seasons, and sometimes we just want to give up. And the series covered a lot of topics that painted an even darker picture than was ever visible before.
He talked about being so stressed by the demands of his career that he started using drugs at far too young of an age, which in turn only made the issues worse. First time I smoked weed was in my backyard here. Got super stoned. And then I realized I liked weed a lot. That’s when my desire to smoke weed started, and then I started smoking weed for a while.
And then started getting really dependent on it, and that’s when I realized that I had to stop. I don’t think it’s bad. I just think for me it it can be a dependency. But yeah, first time I smoked weed I was I don’t suggest this, but I was 13. Yeah, 13, 12 or 13. The thing that was once a source of relaxation became a problem.
There was a time where I was sipping lean, I was popping pills, I was doing Molly, um, you know, shrooms, everything. And it was just an escape for me. I was just young, and you know, like everybody in the industry and people in the world who experiment and do, you know, just normal growing up things. But my experience was in front of cameras, and I had a different level of exposure and people and like I had a lot of money and a lot of things, so then you have all these people around me just kind of hanging on, wanting stuff from me, knowing that like
I was living this lifestyle that they also wanted to live, drinking, smoking. He began to experience fatigue, worsening anxiety, and even depression. He was completely dependent on substances, and that only exacerbated the many other problems he was already having with his mental health. At one point, Justin said it had gotten so bad that he would have his staff and bodyguards come to his room and check if he was still breathing in the middle of the night.
Because I felt like I was like I felt like, bro, I was like dying. My security and stuff were coming into the room at night to check my pulse. Like, people don’t know how serious it got. Like, it was legit crazy scary. And while he was struggling with drug addiction to cope with anxiety and stress, he was then diagnosed with Lyme disease.
Lyme disease occurs when an infected tick transmits bacteria through a bite, and the condition causes fatigue, fever, headaches, and muscle pain, symptoms that are similar to a constant flu, and it can even cause long-term damage to one’s health as well. In addition to this, Justin was diagnosed with chronic Epstein-Barr virus, also known as chronic mono.
While the virus typically only lasts a few weeks in healthy people, Justin’s compromised immune system meant that it remained permanently in his body. The virus disrupted his sleep patterns, triggered frequent headaches, and compounded with his other health issues on top of that. Epstein-Barr, which is mono, uh, have that, too.
That in itself, mono, makes you really sick, and it makes you feel really tired, and some people can’t get out of bed because of it. He saw a psychiatrist in Los Angeles who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder and gave him lithium without ever looking at his brain. When I looked at his brain, it wasn’t bipolar.
Dealing with several chronic illnesses explained why he’s been so distant and fatigued in recent years. He’s dealing with chronic illnesses. It would be a life-changing medical situation for someone who isn’t touring around the world for half the year, let alone someone who is. But for a lot of people who watched the Seasons documentary, it was their first time realizing that Justin Bieber was a person.
For years, the media had profited so much from telling negative stories about him that that was the only perspective people knew. The way that I’ve told this story is looking back. In 2009, no one cared that people were inappropriate towards him in public or that he was around Diddy, or that his team was having him tour around the world every day out of the year, or any of that.
To the outside world, Bieber was a cocky, narcissistic rich kid. And even though he didn’t really start out that way, that’s eventually what he became anyway. But was it because the money went to his head, or was it because he was harassed every day of his life by paparazzi who would chase him on the highway or sell his nude photos? Was it because his life was too easy, or was it because his life was hard? Did he start self-medicating and abusing drugs because he was living the lifestyle of a party animal, or was it because he was forced to work non-stop for years while
the outside world treated him like he was a zoo animal? It raised a lot of questions that hadn’t really been asked before, at least not by the general outside public. He wouldn’t release another album until five years after Purpose, but when he did, it was clear that things had changed. Changes was another big release that shot to number one on the charts, and it even had one of Justin’s biggest hits with Yummy.
But for album sales, it did less than half the first week numbers as Purpose did five years earlier. It was still a big release, but for many critics and fans, it wasn’t a very powerful statement for someone who hadn’t dropped a full-length project or really done much at all in the public eye in almost five years.
Just one year after that, he dropped Justice, which again debuted at number one as usual, but with less than a quarter the amount of first week sales as Purpose did six years before. It wasn’t that Justin had lost his relevance. He was still a huge name, and everything he did was a huge deal, but he wasn’t quite as much in the PR cycle, the promotional cycle, the way he used to be. And the numbers reflected that.
Of course, that isn’t to say at all that he’s fallen off. In 2022, Justin Bieber broke the record for the most monthly listeners of any artist on Spotify, passing 95 million over a year after his supposedly underwhelming Justice was released. So, sure, maybe his last two albums weren’t as big as what he was pumping out back in the day, but his fan base at this point is so big and dedicated that even something that might have flopped compared to his old work has 9 billion Spotify streams and went double platinum. Even right now, it’s
been 4 years since his last release and he’s still over 80 million monthly listeners on Spotify, one of the most listened artists on the whole platform. He still has more Instagram followers than Taylor Swift, right now sitting at almost 300 million. To say that Justin had fallen off would be a huge exaggeration and it wouldn’t be true at all.
But still, understandably, a lot of people thought that his heart might not be in it as much as it once was. But regardless of the kind of arguably pointless discussions about sales numbers and streams, what really mattered is at this point in Justin’s career, it seemed like he was healing. He was on a path to being happier, healthier, and getting better from all the pressure he had been under.
His marriage, his Christian faith, it looked like a positive force for his healing and he even talked about the importance of therapy in helping him fix his life. At one point on Justice, he even touched on his childhood struggles with music in a poignant way that he hadn’t done before. Everybody knows my past now.
Like my house was always made of glass. And maybe that’s the price you pay for the money and fame at an early age. And everybody saw me sick. And it felt like no one gave a [ __ ] They criticized the things I did as an idiot kid. So, after taking a couple of years off to heal from the chaos and the stress of a childhood stolen by the spotlight and then coming back as a more positive, self-assured person with two albums that his fans loved, getting married, finding a relationship with God, it seems like Justin mostly left
the spotlight and got on the right path towards healing. And so, almost no one would have predicted that by 2025, he would be more in the spotlight than ever with the media continuing to scrutinize his every move as his life seems almost to be unraveling worse than ever before with the whole world watching.
Even without releasing an album in 4 years and only appearing occasionally in industry context, the name Justin Bieber still makes headlines every week. But now, it’s for stuff that’s far more personal than his music. It’s about the signs that he’s emotionally, mentally, and spiritually exhausted.
It’s about the signs that his life is falling apart. Even after the Seasons doc, even after his marriage, his new era of healing, it seems like things only started to move backwards with seemingly no explanation. Recently, a couple of Justin’s Instagram stories went viral with some pretty exasperated captions attached.
The slide said, “This is how I feel after people keep telling me there’s more work to do after giving everything I had to give. I don’t think any of us can handle hearing, ‘You just got to try a little harder and you’ll be like me.’ It’s not true. I listened to the fools who told me to work harder and there’s no end to trying to earn your spot in this life cuz I tried.
” That’s only one of many, but for me, it does a good job of summarizing the situation. For the past couple of years, Bieber’s social media posts have slowly become more introspective and bleak. He’s talked about feeling drained, numb, and unworthy. In one post, he said he felt like he was drowning due to years of suppressing negative emotions.
“I was always told when I was a kid not to hate, but it made me feel like I wasn’t allowed to have it and so I didn’t tell anyone I did.” He explained that by hiding his emotions, he was left feeling overwhelmed and unsafe. “I think we can only let hate go by first acknowledging it’s there.
How couldn’t we feel hate from all the hurt we’ve experienced?” The mental turmoil he went through even manifested itself physically. Recent photos show him with a gaunt, hollow-eyed, tired appearance that led to people calling for him to get help before it’s too late. The narrative around Justin being on the brink of a breakdown or worse, it’s louder than ever.
Hundreds of articles and videos are published every week, all alleging that he’s losing his mind, falling apart. Whatever paints the most enticingly negative picture about the singer’s personal life gets spread around the internet like wildfire. On the other hand, the narrative has become completely incomprehensible with rumors following incoherent structures like a lightning strike.
In some cases, he’s healing and taking time to be with his family. In other cases, he’s an awful husband that hates his wife. Sometimes they’ll publish a post about him being a good dad to his son. Other times, it’ll be about him ignoring the kid to have a breakdown in public. Whatever it is, he’s still the focal point for thousands and thousands of articles, posts, and videos every single day.
The internet, Justin’s fans, morbidly fascinated onlookers, everyone was searching for an explanation on how Justin ended up in this state. The Seasons doc, knowing he has a chronic illness, knowing about his drug use, that didn’t seem like a full explanation for just how he ended up this down bad. At first, people were drawn to conspiracy.
It had become obvious over time that Justin Bieber wasn’t exactly treated with dignity by the entertainment industry in general. And so, it didn’t seem like too much of a reach to suggest that Justin could have been the victim of such exploitation himself. Yummy, the lead single from Changes, was seen as possibly having a hidden meaning to do with the abuse of Justin during his time as a child star, with theories about the messaging behind the video spreading all over the internet in the last couple of years. Then you combine that as it being
the same time as the charges against P. Diddy bubbling under the surface, knowing that Justin had a relationship with Diddy since he was 13 years old, isn’t surprising that people would try to connect his obvious discomfort in the public eye with the victimization of young entertainers by people in power throughout the industry.
In 2011, when Diddy and Bieber appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live together, what seemed like a harmless joke at the time now reads much differently. During the interview, P. Diddy made an offhand comment about their friendship, saying that Justin knows better than to talk about what we do together on national television. Talked about this last time.
the Lamborghini for a day or two. He ain’t got access to the house and he knows better than be talking about the things that he does with Big Brother Puff on national television. Well, apparently not. Something Everything ain’t for everybody. But as of now, Justin has denied any involvement in the case and has said out loud that he was never a victim.
Whatever the case might be, the entire situation around Justin started to feel undeniably dark in the last couple of years. The saddest part is though, that you don’t need conspiracy theories or hidden messages to see just how severely the industry mistreated Justin and the toll it took on him.
In reality, it all happened in plain sight and today, it’s nothing if not obvious. But the truth was devastatingly simple. While people searched for puppet masters and secret connections, the real story had already played out in broad daylight. A young talent was pushed to his absolute limits by an entertainment machine that valued revenue over humanity.
The straightforward explanation has always been looking us in the face. The music industry’s exploitation of young stars isn’t a theory, it’s a business model. It’s just how it works. The systematic wearing down of child stars doesn’t happen in secret meetings or through coded messages, it happens in public. Grueling tour schedules, endless media appearances, abuse from the paparazzi, being forced to put on a happy face no matter what’s said to him or about him, having to record constantly, the constant pressure to maintain an
impossible standard of perfection. The real tragedy is that the entertainment industry consumed Justin’s life and turned him into a spectacle for money. No matter what caused his pain though, the problem at the end of the day is that Bieber is so big, he can’t even suffer in peace. Even if he isn’t making music, even if all he’s doing is expressing his pain into the void, even if he’s gone from entertainment in general, he’s too big to be left alone.
There’s too much money they can make off his name to let him heal in peace. Even now, Justin seems like he’s far from healing. It’s become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more the media hounds him, the more he struggles, but that only gives the media more content to hound him with. It’s a cycle of exploitation that’s all too familiar.
Justin being only one in a long line of entertainers who have become so big that the media will never leave them alone. Even if he goes into hiding or disappears from music forever, which he almost already has, he’ll always be a subject of fascination. In the last year or two, it’s reached a breaking point as the cycle has gotten a lot worse and it all points towards one depressing, horrifying fact about Justin Bieber’s life.
It wasn’t just the label executives or the managers that treated him that way. It was the people who he turned to behind closed doors for help that did it even worse. His finances, his faith in God, even his marriage, they were all supposed to be a safe haven. But when you look close enough, you start to realize that the problem was never just fame.
The problem was that there was never anyone in his corner that wasn’t trying to get something from him. In 2018, Justin Bieber married Hailey Baldwin, a model and the daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin. And at first, it seemed like a truly positive change in his life. When they seemingly got engaged out of nowhere in late 2018, this narrative popped up that Hailey had been practically stalking Justin over the years with people citing moments where she was seen in the same place as him multiple times without knowing him since the beginning of his career.
Whether or not that was true though, it didn’t stop the media from turning their marriage into a circus either way. Their relationship, like everything else in Justin’s life, became highly publicized. Photos of them circulated online while he was still on and off with Selena Gomez and some people went as far as to accuse Hailey of being obsessed with Selena, claiming that she copied her style or tried to look like her to please Justin.
TikToks and conspiracy threads were spreading the idea online that there were a lot of overlaps between Selena and Hailey and this put their relationship under intense scrutiny. Recently, Hailey opened up about the situation, saying, “People have made me feel so bad about my relationship since day one, saying they’re falling apart, they hate each other, they’re getting divorced.
It’s like people don’t want to believe that we’re happy. I used to try and act like it hurts less and less, and I tried to think that you get used to it at a certain point, and this is how people are going to be. But I realized that it doesn’t actually ever hurt any less. Still, even his marriage remains under constant media scrutiny with tabloids regularly publishing speculative stories about his relationship troubles.
Despite both Justin and his wife repeatedly addressing these rumors, the media narrative persists in analyzing their every interaction, making her look like an obsessed stalker and him like an absent hateful husband would rather be somewhere else. His marriage, which is supposed to be a personal refuge, has become yet another spectacle for the public’s consumption.
And obviously, this video isn’t about Justin Bieber’s marriage because that’s an entire topic on its own, but I think it’s safe to say even that wasn’t off the limits for the onlookers. But Justin Bieber’s marriage isn’t the only aspect of his personal life that’s been subject to endless theories and discussion in the last couple of years.
The other, perhaps even more personal side of his life that’s been equally as insane of a spectacle, is his religion. Bieber has been outspoken about his religion and the balance and the meaning it’s provided to him ever since he was a kid. But even when turning to spirituality to help him heal and live a more fulfilled meaningful life, Justin has only been met with more blatant exploitation with his faith becoming yet another source of media speculation.
But you can hardly blame people for being interested in. Many of the people he’s been involved with on this journey have had dubious intentions at best. Carl Lentz, the megachurch pastor from Hillsong New York that baptized Justin and served as his spiritual advisor, was fired from the church he worked at in 2020 for breaches of trust and moral failures.
Not long after that, the wife of another pastor from their network publicly accused him of manipulation, control, abuse of power, and sexual abuse towards her when she had worked as the Lentz family’s nanny between 2011 and 2017. During the time that he was active in Justin’s life as a Christian advisor, he admitted to all of it about 2 years later, also opening up about a prescription drug addiction at the time among other examples of infidelity.
Justin is no longer associated with Hillsong, and Hillsong has since been the center of countless other controversies, but in the mid-2010s, Carl Lentz was a focal point in Justin’s life, and at one point he even stayed at Lentz’s house for several months during the height of his PR issues. Even more strange, though, Bieber has also been associated with a group called Churchome since 2010, being introduced to the lead pastor Judah Smith by his mother, who thought that Judah could help him grapple with the increasing pressure of fame through a
lens of faith. Judah is a sixth-generation pastor who founded the church in LA after he and his wife supposedly felt a calling to show compassion for celebrities grappling with addiction, mental struggles, and the emptiness of fame in spite of their success. Since founding their church, they’ve attracted many people, including Selena Gomez, the Kardashian family, Lana Del Rey, and others who attend their services that focus on a youth-friendly preaching style with hipster fashion and progressive messaging. And over the years, the
relationship between Judah Smith and Justin Bieber became notably close with Smith even officiating his wedding in 2019. However, it started to look like Judah’s influence over Justin’s life may have grown far beyond what most people would consider normal for a pastor’s spiritual guidance. Ryan Good, the co-founder and creative director of Bieber’s Drew House clothing brand, ended up leaving the company entirely when Justin brought Judah Smith on as a member of the board, calling Churchome a cult and eventually even losing all
contact with Bieber over the issue. There were even reports that Bieber and Smith confronted Scooter Braun to challenge him over his Jewish background and moral values. Away from his relationship with Bieber, though, Judah Smith, who has over 700,000 Instagram followers, has also been involved in several scandals, many relating to his preaching of homophobic values, and in one recent case, his church’s rehiring of a man who was previously found to have sexually assaulted someone.
In 2005, he wrote an article where he said that homosexuality is a sin the same as murder and rape. But of course, the issue above all is that churches like Hillsong and Churchome don’t really feel like holy places of worship. Instead, they’re kind of more similar to cults of personality, wrapping worship in trendy clothes and superficial preaching, selling spirituality like it’s a lifestyle brand.
But even while turning to the church for stability and guidance, the never-ending cycle of being watched and having his personal choices used for content still doesn’t end with even the people he looks to for personal guidance using him as leverage to put themselves in the spotlight for their own selfish reasons. But another person that Justin got connected with at Churchome was Lou Taylor, an infamous talent agent and a board member at the church, who he would then hire to work as his financial and business manager.
He ended up firing her in 2024, but if the rumors are to be believed, that only happened after she convinced him to alter the course of his future forever. In the last couple of years, there has been a big trend of older artists who are beyond their peak popularity selling off the rights to their music to private equity firms. It makes sense.
If you aren’t making that much music anymore and you want to have enough money to leave your family an inheritance or to retire, why not take a cool hundred million dollars to make sure everything is taken care of? It’s usually a long-term deal that in most cases has seemed like a pretty good deal for the artist.
But again, most of these sales have come from artists that are older, people who aren’t really releasing new albums anymore, people that aren’t trying to be working the long difficult hours of a constant touring schedule. The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Dr. Dre, these are some of the biggest examples of catalog sales from the last few years.
Mostly, it’s people who are 60, 70 years old or older. That’s why it was shocking when Justin Bieber sold the rights to everything he had ever made at the age of 30. Justin received over 200 million dollars in exchange for the rights to all of the music he created throughout his career so far. Everything from Baby to Boyfriend to Yummy, the rights to that music is now in possession of Hipgnosis Songs Capital, who are also known for buying the rights to work by Shakira, Mark Ronson, Neil Young, and other artists.
But more than anything, the news kind of struck as being almost nonsensical. Bieber is only 30 years old. He’s still making a lot of money off his catalog, being one of the most popular artists on streaming platforms. Why would he cash out so early? People were left wondering what made Justin make this decision, and whose idea really was it? In the end, the smoking gun pointed at Lou Taylor.
She wasn’t just any talent agent or business manager working in Hollywood. In fact, she was one of the people who was directly responsible for Britney Spears being placed under a conservatorship back in 2008. But the point is that anyone who helps negotiate a catalog sale like this stands to earn a pretty huge commission.
And given what we know about Lou Taylor’s career history, it’s plausible that she convinced Justin to sell his catalog even if it was or wasn’t a smart financial decision. So, is it possible that someone who had a leadership role at Justin’s church and years of experience brokering deals for entertainers would selfishly convince a vulnerable Bieber to sign away the rights to everything he had ever made to get herself a quick 10% commission in the form of 20 million dollars? But either way, at least he now had enough money to last him a lifetime. With less
pressure to create, tour, perform, he could sit back and take care of himself. Or at least, he should have. But somehow, the story only gets worse from there. Because as it turned out, he in fact did not have enough money to last a lifetime, and not even selling off the rights to his musical legacy could fix that.
Because it turns out that Justin was only able to get about half as much for his catalog as he could have if he owned the masters for his recordings. But in that case, he never did. The deal that Scooter Braun and Usher signed him into back when he was 13 years old, that was a 360 deal that gave Universal Music perpetual control of everything his albums would ever earn for royalties.
Justin could only sell his publishing rights, but he did completely. And now, he would never receive another penny from the countless hits he created and performed again. The other problem is that Justin Bieber was in a ton of debt. His supposed comeback albums, Changes and Justice, only caused more financial complications for his career.
The Justice World Tour, which was planned to include more than 140 concerts over the course of a year, ended abruptly in the summer of 2022 when Justin announced that he’d been diagnosed with facial paralysis that prevented him from continuing to perform. The only issue is that Justin had a tour deal with AEG that secured him a 40 million-dollar advance for the 140-show run around the world.
But since he only completed 35% of the shows, he owed them back 26 million dollars for not being able to finish as planned. And with Justin never having owned his masters, that wasn’t a source of revenue he could rely on to help solve the problem. Not long after that, it was also revealed that Bieber owed Scooter Braun, who is now himself worth more than 400 million dollars, almost 10 million dollars for advanced commissions on projects and deals he never completed.
And so, it was somewhat unsurprising that just a couple months after this news went public at the end of 2022, he sold his entire catalog in a shockingly quick deal that seemed to have been both not entirely in his best interest, but also his last resort. Apparently, the situation was bad enough that he even passed up the opportunity to get a tax credit that would have saved him millions of dollars if he had waited just 1 month to sell the catalog, but instead chose to sell it immediately and deal with the consequences later.
It’s surprising and disappointing to see that even Scooter Braun, who literally discovered Justin when he was a kid and helped him build his career from the ground up, ended up making more off Bieber’s career than he did and ends up at odds with him over money. And sure, Scooter Braun has a right to collect money he’s owed, but the situation highlights the way that Justin was taken advantage of in the industry as a kid, putting his trust in people who were ultimately being paid to manage him properly, and then ending up with no
ownership over his masters years later, having to sell what little he does own just to keep his head above water. Meanwhile, the people who signed him are making more money off his career than he did, all from a deal that he got into at the age of 13. And so, it begs the question, how did Justin Bieber get into this situation? Whose fault is it? Is Justin a victim? Did he run his own life into the ground? How did he end up where he is today? Obviously, Justin Bieber isn’t an angel.
He’s made a lot of choices that people consider narcissistic, self-centered, hurtful. In 2019, he posted on Instagram, “There’s an insane pressure and responsibility to someone whose brain, emotions, and frontal lobes aren’t developed yet. I started doing pretty heavy drugs and abused all my relationships at 18. I became distant to everyone who loved me.
It’s not that he doesn’t know what he did. It’s not like he has no idea why the entire world hated him for so long, but ultimately, that’s only one small part of the bigger story. The story of Justin Bieber is the story of someone who was exploited by everyone around him as much as humanly possible for more than half his life.
His career generated over a billion dollars, and even though he was mainly the one person responsible for keeping it all together, most of that money was never his. He definitely got to live a lavish lifestyle and have all the cars and the private plane rides you could ever want, but in the end, he was left with far less than what his success should have earned him, having signed away the majority of the rights to his music when he was a kid with a 360 deal at the age of 13.
But even beyond money, what it cost him as a person cut even deeper. And so, his story isn’t about the fame. It’s about the cost of it. He was thrown into the spotlight as a 13-year-old kid, instantly he became one of the most profitable products the music industry ever saw. Every scandal, every haircut, every speeding ticket, it was all monetized by thousands of people in every direction.
And even when he tried to take control to rewrite his narrative and move on, he found himself only deeper embedded in the celebrity machine and completely powerless to get out. I don’t think it’s crazy to say that he got pimped out by the industry. Even his mistakes weren’t just mistakes. They were turned into the most profitable celebrity content of generation.
He became so big that even when he tries to hide, they find a way to make it news. And now, with the world watching the final stages of him falling apart with the weight behind his eyes seeming heavier than ever, it’s still hasn’t stopped. The world got what it wanted from Justin Bieber, but what did he get in return? Couple of fancy cars and a burden so heavy that it looks like it might kill him.
After growing up in a dysfunctional, struggling family in a small town in Canada, Bieber signs to a major label in a 360 deal at the age of 13. But despite him making relatively wholesome, friendly pop music, journalists, interviewers, and tabloids over-sexualize him and make a mockery of his persona, resulting in him becoming a joke in the eyes of the general public.
And that creates a monster, not out of him, but of everyone else. Adults who don’t know his music are watching this gross content about him, and it quickly becomes an all-out harassment campaign with some of the most disgusting reactions possible to everything he does, no matter how innocent the actual content of his music was.
Baby, his big breakout single, became the most viewed and the most disliked YouTube video at the same time. He’s essentially working non-stop, touring, recording, promoting over and over. He gets so tired of the demanding schedule that he’s hiding his own passport to avoid having to go back out on the road for the thousandth time in a row. He stays positive.
He talks about wanting to buy his mom a house, mentioning how growing up without money, he doesn’t want to waste the opportunity to help his family. At one point, he says, “I think people are waiting for the time when I make a mistake, and they’re going to jump on it. I don’t want to mess this up.” But eventually, he does anyway.
It begs the question, how much do you really need? How far do you need to go? For every great thing that Justin Bieber achieved, he’s followed by another issue. In the end, it makes what we often think of falling off look more like a blessing than a curse. At least if you fall off, you get to live your own life and not be chased forever and ever by people who are just asking for more and more as you beg for them to stop.
Successful entertainers, sure, they might get to drive around in a G Wagon and have their face on a billboard. They might have people screaming their names when they perform, but their life ceases to belong to them. Past a certain point, you might have it all, but at the same time, in a way, you have nothing.
No right to privacy, no ability to make mistakes, and no way to escape the constant pressure of being product rather than a person. And for some people, that’s the dream. That’s all they’ve ever wanted, and good for them. I don’t support it, but that’s your choice to make. The only problem is that Justin Bieber didn’t get to make the choice.
He didn’t understand or know that this is where it would go when he was a little kid signing a contract with a major record label who would then go on to use him for decades. It’s hard for us to imagine Justin Bieber with all of his money and access isn’t happy. It’s difficult to be empathetic towards that. He’s a rich guy. Everyone loves him.
Why would he have mental issues as a result of fame? He could just go get therapy. He could just go drive his Ferrari. But at the same time, by acting that way, we’re becoming part of the problem. I think we all understand that buying a supercar and having a therapist isn’t really going to fix your personal issues.
I think we would all go insane if there were paparazzi chasing us on the highway, millions of people analyzing the inner dynamics of our marriage, having every moment of our lives turned into clickbait headlines. Justin Bieber isn’t the first or the last person who’s been through this. He’s just who it’s happening to right now.
Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, that’s just three examples of people whose very existence was fed into a machine and spit out for content. The faces change, but the cycle doesn’t. And there’s no point where it’ll stop because right now, it’s still working as intended. And I think that’s what it means to sell your soul.
Yes, you can have everything you ever wanted. The money, the fame, it’s all yours. But you lose the parts of yourself that you took for granted. The right to have a moment of quiet, to live your life unbothered. And the saddest part of it all for Justin Bieber is that he signed away his life at an age where he was too young to understand what he was giving up.
At the time, he was a kid who was good at singing, a kid with natural rhythm who liked performing. The biggest thought in his head was helping his mom buy a house, something they’d never been able to do before. He didn’t know it would cost him his life. And so, 15 years later, he’s cursed to live the rest of his life in an empty, stressed, tired state of anxiety.
Even worse, the people who were supposed to help him have only attracted more problems and negative attention. Everyone from his managers to his spiritual advisers to even his family has had unclear, allegedly selfish motives. Meanwhile, the whole time, things for him have only gotten worse. It’s a reminder that we don’t need conspiracies or hidden truths to see just how evil the entertainment industry can be.
Everything that was done to Justin Bieber happened in broad daylight. And of course, they didn’t even try to hide it because what happened to Justin wasn’t a mistake. the system doing what it was supposed to do. What I call a tragedy, they call business. And you can only hope that somehow, eventually, Bieber might find a way to live out the rest of his life the way that he wants to. I’m Philip.
This is Volksgeist. Thank you for watching. There’s a documentary I’ve made that I want all of you to know about, but it was actually too much for YouTube. It’s a documentary I made about the history of violent music with all of the raw footage included, talking about bands that committed murder and burned down buildings over their music, performers that hurt the audience or destroyed the concert venue, or threw poop at their fans as part of the show.
I think it might be obvious why ultimately it’s not on YouTube because it just isn’t a YouTube video. Danger Music is a Nebula original, funded by and exclusively available on Nebula, because of their mission to be the best place for creators to make work that we couldn’t make anywhere else. They gave me the resources to make the best documentary I possibly could, and I think it turned out really great.
Nebula is a platform I own and co-founded with other creators as a place where we can elevate ourselves to a level beyond what we were previously capable of. We’ve come together to create our own platform, and it’s quickly becoming the most interesting, fastest-growing independent video platform anywhere. It’s not our safe haven.
It’s not a place to hide from the rules. It’s a place to grow and blossom into something completely different. Nebula has produced originals like Lindsay Ellis’s Ballad of John and Yoko, which dives deep into the unintended consequences of the murder of John Lennon. It’s a beautiful documentary exploring one of the strangest stories in modern music history.
And they have even more interesting shows like the in-depth geopolitics show on modern conflicts or Jetlag, which is a travel game show where the players use the literal real world as their sandbox. It’s a unique concept which is exciting and wouldn’t be possible without Nebula. We’re even producing movies this year. One of them is Dracula’s ex-girlfriend.
It’s coming out in a few months, and it got covered in Variety, one of the most popular entertainment magazines in the world. So, Nebula is becoming the answer to the question, how do you make art or content that’s as high-quality and interesting as traditional media without the corruption and exploitation associated with that industry.
I’ve always wanted to take my videos to the next level and make them more substantiated and more interesting than ever before. And Nebula is enabling that for our entire list of creators. Better stories, better production value, taking creators to the next level is what Nebula is all about, and it’s only getting better as time goes on.
So, if you want to join a platform that’s pushing entertainment forward, enabling us to make things we never could have made before, you can get access to exclusives like my Danger Music documentary and high-quality, thoughtful videos from hundreds of other creators like Adam Neely, Todd in the Shadows, Polyphonic, FD Signifier, Bobby Brocc and countless other storytellers, you should join Nebula today.
So, go check out my show Danger Music or Jetlag or the Ballad of John and Yoko by going to nebula.tv/volksgeist to get 40% off because Nebula is only $30 per year when you use my code. Not only is it the most interesting video platform anywhere, it’s also affordable. I even have a Nebula exclusive class breaking down my entire video production process from writing to graphics and more, which I think a lot of you would enjoy as well.
It’s not just any project, it’s my project, and it’s a project you don’t want to miss out on.
