Justin Bieber Finds His Bliss
On February 14, 2020, the same day that Justin Bieber's new album Changes was released, YouTube — the platform on which he'd famously been discovered — celebrated its 15th birthday. A cherubic, shaggy-haired Bieber was even a few years younger than that when he started uploading videos to the streaming site. These digital time capsules still exist in their original forms: Covers of songs by Chris Brown, Justin Timberlake, and Ne-Yo, all marked with the not-quite-hashtag-catchy description "Justin singing." The videos' descriptions link to his Myspace page, and some of them clarify that his last name "sounds like Beeber." In the clip for his cover of "Cry Me a River," the body of his acoustic guitar looks bigger than he is.
Some YouTube rabbit hole or another led Scooter Braun, a manager and one-time executive at So So Def Records, to one of Bieber's videos. You know the rest of the story: By age 13, Bieber was recording demos. He started partying too hard. He got in trouble with the law. He fell from grace and then, thanks to a megachurch, a team of doctors, and eventually the love of his wife Hailey Baldwin Bieber, he to the world, on the same platform that had helped him get his voice out in the first place, that he was ready for his comeback.
