What’s Going On With Justin Bieber, Explained
Justin Bieber is back in the spotlight, though not for entirely good reasons. A recent clip of the pop star chastising paparazzi (which has since gone megaviral) has turned him into a catchphrase-coining meme, but not without also earning him a significant amount of worry from his fans. This comes after a long string of eyebrow-raising behavior from the singer, as seen in both in-person interactions captured on video and his increasingly troubling social media posts. Observers have been so concerned that countless outlets (yes, Slate now included) have published pieces with the same exact headline: What is going on with Justin Bieber? And yet, the faster outlets try to explain, the faster new developments get added to Bieber’s increasingly confounding story of late. Here’s our best attempt at explaining the ongoing news cycle engulfing one of music’s favorite wild-card stars.
Every time I log onto my social media, someone is joking about how it’s “not clocking to you” that they’re “standing on business.” What the hell does this mean and what does it have to do with Justin Bieber?
On June 12, as the singer was leaving Soho House in Malibu, California, he got into a verbal argument with paparazzi who were waiting by his car. Instead of ignoring the photographers, like most A-listers would, Bieber turned and chastised them, resulting in what is now a viral clip. The interaction starts with Bieber asking them to stop, explaining, “I’m a real dad with a real family,” before saying, “I’m not afraid to actually set boundaries,” when the men ask why he is getting so mad. Eventually, Bieber utters the now-popular line: “You’re not getting it. … It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, is it?”
Both Bieber’s notoriety and highly serious tone while uttering this warning (and misuse of African American Vernacular English) made the quote just off-kilter enough for social media users to take it and run. Thus, the phrase became a highly popular meme that spread like wildfire.
In all fairness, if a group of people with cameras were waiting for me by my car, I would also have some choice words for them.
And you wouldn’t be alone, I’m sure! Despite the phrase itself being funny, the video is actually quite sad. At the start of their verbal altercation, Bieber explains basic courtesy to the videographers, saying, “You don’t go to someone you don’t know, and you stick a camera in their face, you don’t do that.” When they retort that he’s a public figure and a celebrity, he says that “it doesn’t matter,” pointing out that they were originally standing on private property before moving to the sidewalk. In the moments after Bieber says the now-viral phrase, he also chastises the paparazzi for treating him as subhuman. He asks them, “You don’t think I’m a real fucking guy, do you?” before acknowledging that he knows the video will be taken “out of context” and will lead to people calling him “mad.” He tells the paparazzi that he doesn’t “care what kind of dirty work” they’re “getting paid in the background” to do that would result in them “provok[ing]” him. “Clearly you’re here for an alternate agenda, [or else] why would you wanna be here to provoke me like this? This isn’t love. … This is weird, bro,” he continues.
It’s not surprising that, on the internet, Bieber’s one-liner has become joke fodder, while the parts of the interaction in which he laments the fact that he is not treated with the same respect as most other humans has been largely forgotten. However, some onlookers have voiced their concern for the singer’s well-being, given that this outburst feels like an ominous marker after a number of social faux pas and public sightings that have had Bieber’s fans worried about his health.
I’m now realizing that I haven’t heard about him as much recently. Why have his fans been worried about him?
You likely haven’t heard much from him because back in August, Bieber and his wife, Hailey Bieber (née Baldwin—yes, those Baldwins), the founder of the popular skin care brand Rhode, welcomed their first child, a son named Jack Blues Bieber. Since then, things have been pretty quiet for the singer, who hasn’t released an album since Justice in 2021.
As for why his fans are worried, the evidence has seemingly been mounting. There have been the run-ins with paparazzi, like this “standing on business” instance and Bieber’s verbal confrontation with paparazzi at Coachella this past April. There have also been in-person sightings in which Bieber, according to fans, appears under the weather, like when he was photographed earlier this year walking in New York City.
But perhaps even more concerning have been the star’s odd social media posts. As early as February, observers noted that Bieber was starting to behave a little strangely online, like with this surprisingly unsettling video of Bieber smoking and listening to music on Feb. 27. Around that time, Bieber’s team had squashed concerns that the singer was abusing substances again, telling TMZ that “despite the obvious truth, people are committed to keeping negative, salacious, harmful narratives alive.”
Still, Bieber’s erratic and enigmatic posting to his Instagram continued to worry his fans. For example, in March, Bieber posted an Instagram Story with a deeply vulnerable message about his low self-esteem, saying that he has “always felt unworthy” and like “a fraud” when people told him he deserved positive things. He continued by saying, “I definitely feel unequipped and unqualified most days.”
While people are puzzled by Bieber’s actions, there has also been a bubbling rumor about whether or not Bieber was victimized by Sean “Diddy” Combs—a collaborator and friend of Bieber’s in the past, who is currently embroiled in a federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial—and if so, whether that might have something to do with the singer’s apparent downward spiral. (A representative for Bieber was quick to assert that Bieber is not one of Combs’ alleged victims.)
And let’s not forget other social media controversies, like when the singer posted on Instagram congratulating his wife, Hailey, for landing a Vogue cover.
What? How can a congratulatory post for a major career milestone be controversial?
Underneath the post, in a caption that has since been deleted and replaced with emojis, Bieber wrote about a moment in the couple’s past when they had gotten into “a huge fight,” during which he says he had told her “she would never be on the cover of Vogue.” He acknowledged how wrong and hurtful the comment was at the time, ending the caption with: “So, baby, you already know, but forgive me for saying you wouldn’t get a Vogue cover, ‘cause clearly I was sadly mistaken.” Many people flooded his comments, saying that he could have kept this piece of information to himself, insinuating that it might be embarrassing for him and his wife, despite him using the anecdote as a way to celebrate her massive achievement.
Yikes! I’m almost scared to ask what other things he’s been posting.
Unfortunately, Bieber’s posting has not let up. Let’s take the days after the “it’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business” video went viral, as they’re fairly indicative of what his social media activity has been like for the past few months. On June 14, Bieber posted seven different times to his main Instagram grid in one day—this may sound trivial, and perhaps it is, but the unwritten rules of Instagram, as dictated by the platform’s power users, suggest that posting too often is unusual and frowned upon. However, even more eyebrow-raising than the cadence of posts was the caption that Bieber used for most of them: nothing but the middle-finger emoji. The choice of caption registers as even more questionable when you consider that most of these posts consist of photos of him and his infant son, as well as clothing designs and prototypes for his rather cryptic new clothing brand Skylrk. On Father’s Day, Bieber even posted a close-up selfie with the caption “I’m a dad that’s not to be fucked with,” accompanied by the middle-finger emoji. (The Biebers also made headlines on Father’s Day and in the days following for some rumored feud allegedly playing out in their social media comments.)
Days later, on June 16, Bieber did the same, posting to Instagram another batch of separate posts, most of them accompanied by that same emoji caption. One of these posts really raised some disquiet among his fans: It was an Instagram carousel of screenshots of a text conversation that seemed to show Bieber cutting ties with an unknown friend, with the singer texting, “If you don’t like my anger you don’t like me. My anger is a response to pain I have been through. Asking a traumatized person not to be traumatized is simply mean.” After the former pal wrote back that Bieber was “lashing out,” Bieber responded by writing: “This friendship is officially over. I will never accept a man calling my anger lashing out … I have good friends who will respect these boundaries. I thought you were a pussy, which is why I always kept my distance, but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. This confirms you were the pussy I always thought you were.” With no context, airing out this private exchange for the world to see came across as both unnecessary and out of place.
As a coda, the end of that batch of posts included a photo of Bieber smoking a blunt, followed by a separate apology post, and a video of him zooming in on a glass bong that has a sticker of his face on the side of it while the song “Parked Out by the Lake” from Donny Cowboy is playing in the background. The apology consisted of typed texts on a multicolored background. It reads:
People keep telling me to heal. Don’t you think if I could have fixed myself I would have already? I know I’m broken. I know I have anger issues. I tried to do the work my whole life to be like the people who told me I needed to be fixed like them. And it just keeps making me more tired and angry. The harder I try to grow, the more focused on myself I am. Jesus is the only person who keeps me wanting to make my life about others, because honestly I’m exhausted with thinking about myself lately aren’t you?
Meanwhile, as far as the business of “standing on business” goes, Bieber appears to have fully embraced the public’s obsession with the phrase. He even went so far as to post a remix song someone had made of the viral clip to his Instagram account.
Well, that’s … a lot. Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t Justin Bieber had various issues in the past? Could this sort of behavior be a result of that?
Much happened to Bieber in 2022 and 2023 that could have been distressing. In June 2022, he postponed some shows on his Justice World Tour before revealing that he had been diagnosed with a health condition called Ramsay Hunt syndrome, which had resulted in partial facial paralysis, among other serious symptoms. The tour wound up being postponed a number of times before it was fully canceled due to the singer’s ongoing health issues. Around the same time, he also caught attention for appearing intoxicated onstage, like when he sang a rendition of his song “Stay” (with rapper-singer the Kid Laroi) while seemingly drunk in 2023. The following year, it was revealed that the singer had sold the rights to his entire music catalog for a reported $200 million. In a TMZ documentary that premiered last month, titled TMZ Investigates: What Happened to Justin Bieber?, the tabloid reports that the deal was finalized in December of 2022, and that Bieber had made the decision because he was “on the verge of financial collapse.”
Canceling his tour and selling his entire music catalog were both taken as signs that Bieber might have been in financial distress. This rumor gained purchase in 2024, when it was reported that Bieber had parted ways with his longtime manager Scooter Braun, to whom the singer had been loyal since the dawn of his career, when Braun helped discover him through YouTube. In spite of the news that Braun was retiring as a manager (he decided to solely focus on spearheading the American division of the Korean entertainment company Hybe) and thus severing direct managing ties with all of his famous acts, many rumors began to bubble up about Bieber and Braun’s relationship in particular. Namely, TMZ reported that finances had caused a rift in their relationship, with Bieber allegedly owing Braun more than $8 million dollars. In April, the Hollywood Reporter ran a lengthy report on Bieber, which, among many things, detailed the rumored growing rift between Braun and Bieber surrounding their financial differences and concerns. (THR’s report also includes a vehement denial of these rumors from Bieber’s team, who told the outlet that “any source that is trying to sell you a story about alleged financial distress … either doesn’t understand the entertainment industry or, more likely, is trying to paint an unflattering portrait of Justin, which bears no resemblance to reality.”) For what it’s worth, earlier this month, Braun mentioned in a podcast that his and Bieber’s relationship is “not the same that it was” before.
All of this is on top of years of Bieber struggling with his health and the spotlight, as illustrated by previous altercations with paparazzi (some of which crossed the law), his admissions of some serious prior substance abuse, his 2020 diagnosis of Lyme disease, and his earlier career postponements to work on his mental health.
That’s actually pretty sad.
The entertainment industry is notoriously a difficult one to navigate, especially for stars who achieved fame as young and as swiftly as Bieber did. While it’s understandable that fans who have watched and supported an artist for years may feel genuine concern for them, in this case and others, perhaps the best medicine is just allowing someone who could be going through a crisis their privacy—which, coincidentally, seems to be the one thing Bieber is asking for. And, while we’re at it, maybe someone should tell him to log off Instagram for a while.
Slate
