After all the months that Justin Bieber has been scrutinized by paparazzi and fans, all speculating in endless headlines and social media items, about his bizarre Instagram posts, mental health and marriage to model and beauty entrepreneur Hailey Bieber, the pop singer surprised the world early Friday by releasing his long-anticipated seventh album, “Swag.”
Predictably, Bieber’s fans spent hours dissecting the lyrics of the 21 tracks to look for clues about his well-being and the state of his marriage. Vulture said the lyrics — on this “mediocre” new album — largely deal with his “complicated” marriage to Hailey and are “skewed toward ‘I still love you.’”
“Baby, I ain’t walking away,” Bieber sings on the aptly-named song, “Walking Away.”
So, maybe fans have their answer — Justin Bieber isn’t having a breakdown, and he and Hailey are fine but probably dealing with their share of relationship issues. But why did it take all this time for the 31-year-old singer to come out and say so, and in a way that might finally get his message across? Some music critics and Bieber observers have their theories.
“At the very least, it seems that both Justin and Hailey have capitalized well on their recent controversies — if not engineered them altogether,” said music writer Solomon Pace-McCarrick at the British music quarterly Dazed.
Pace-McCarrick pointed out that Hailey Bieber played a role in the album announcement, with Vulture saying that her “art” is Instagram Story and she knows how to deploy it to maximum effect. She reposted the “Swag” album announcement on her Instagram Story, with a defiant message: “Is it finally clocking to you (expletive) losers?” Hailey was referring to the viral video of her husband’s June 13 confrontation with the paparazzi outside a Malibu club, during which he yelled at them to stop provoking him and said, “I’m a dad. I’m a husband.”
Justin Bieber, in a bright blue hoodie, then uttered the words that have since become a catchphrase and meme: “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business,” In other words, he was telling the photographers to stop using his angry encounters with them as evidence that he’s in meltdown mode. Rather, he’s “standing on business” — implying that he’s standing firmly on his principles, whatever they may be.
Meanwhile, one of the tracks on “Swag” is “Therapy Session,” in which Bieber and comedian and YouTube personality Druski address public speculation that he is a deeply “troubled, traumatized man.”
“Sometimes I know you’re trolling,” Druski offered up to Bieber’s mumbles of agreement. “(People) don’t even understand it, like, ‘Oh my God, he’s losing his (expletive) mind!’ … Nah, I just think he’s being a human being, he’s enjoying social media like the rest of us.”
Bieber replied: “Yeah, I think that’s been a tough thing for me recently, is feeling like, you know, I’ve had to go through a lot of my struggles as a human, as all of us do, really publicly, and so people are always asking if I’m OK.”
He continued, “Somebody keeps saying, ‘Why are you crying? Why are you crying?’ It’s like, I’m not but now I am. … You know I’m saying, it starts to make me feel like I’m the one with issues.”
A Bieber fan on Instagram agreed that the singer probably is capitalizing on the attention, even if it’s negative. While playing a clip of the paparazzi confrontation, the fan wrote: “Justin Bieber was actually standing on business! No promotion. Nothing. Just social media trend and trolls did the work for Justin who dropped his 7th studio album on Friday, that’s today. It has 21 songs.”
Meanwhile, Vulture has described the various ways that Justin and Hailey Bieber have generated headlines in recent months. For example, there has been talk about about them growing apart, after seven years of marriage and becoming parents to a son in 2024. At one point, they unfollowed each other on Instagram, which Hailey attributed to a “glitch,” writing on TikTok that she “didn’t unfollow him. Hope this helps!”
More recently, Justin celebrated his wife’s May 20 Vogue cover by writing on Instagram, “I told hails that she would never be on the cover of vogue. Yikes I know, so mean. For some reason because I felt disrespected I thought I gotta get even … So baby u already know but forgive me for saying u wouldn’t get a vogue cover cuz clearly i was sadly mistaken.”
That “rudeness did not go unnoticed,” Vulture said. It certainly didn’t, while Hailey Bieber has consistently “stood by her man.” But this act of rudeness simply constitutes one of the many chapters in the Bieber marriage saga, and now fans are rushing to listen to Justin’s new album and analyze the ways the couple are still arguing or trying to work things out.