I’m forced to admit something shameful here, which is that when I see videos of Justin Bieber confronting paparazzi, I scroll past them with the sound off. Bieber’s ongoing war against the paparazzi, and seemingly also himself and those around him, has reached a point of thudding tediousness. He is clearly unhappy, and whatever he’s attempting to do to rectify that isn’t working. On Father’s Day, in between photos of his baby son’s chubby hand and a photo of himself smiling, Bieber shared a text screenshot in which he scolded a now-ex-friend for checking in. Bieber has been cutting people out of his life left and right for some time, severing ties with both his old business partner Ryan Good and Scooter Braun a while back. While his Father’s Day drama unfolded, there was a new series of words making the rounds both as audio on TikTok and captions on Twitter: “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, is it?” For all of 48 hours, I had no idea that this was connected to Justin Bieber; now I know better.
On Saturday, June 13, Bieber confronted paparazzi outside of a Malibu club in a blue hoodie, where he tried to explain his annoyance to them by saying, very seriously, “You’re not getting it. It’s not clocking to you. It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, is it?” His earnest attempt to use these phrases that reference both AAVE and queer slang (though most recently made popular by Drake in the 2023 song “Daylight”) sounds unbelievably silly. It’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” turbocharged. He’s trying to articulate what he’s been telling the paparazzi for months — that he wants to be left alone — but having been through the wringer using conventional “leave me alone” language, Bieber is trying a different approach to no success.
What’s happened, in turn, is that the whole thing has now become a meme.
The Kendall Roy of it all feels like an apt comparison: Both he and Bieber are troubled, traumatized men who try to articulate their pain in ways that are often laughable. What’s going on with Bieber is so far past the point of being funny that now, unfortunately, it’s become funny. This is often how a cycle of celebrity meltdown goes: concern, annoyance, memes. Remember the absurdity of “Tiger Blood”? Or Britney Spears’s Instagram? Both Bieber and Spears’s content oscillate between good-humored trolling and cause for concern, leaving everyone staring at their phones to wonder whether they’re in on the joke or the joke itself. The last thing Bieber needs right now is to become a punch line while he’s trying to stand on business, but sadly, no one is clocking it.
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