Justin Bieber briefly posted a new series of perplexing videos to his Instagram account, adopting a heavily distorted voice and appearance, further fueling existing concerns among fans and observers about his current state of well-being.
The 31-year-old pop superstar shared a 13-part carousel on Tuesday, May 13, featuring short, disjointed monologues on a wide array of subjects, from unverified claims about his past to fragmented spiritual declarations and philosophical statements.
Each clip shows Bieber speaking directly to the camera through a filter that warps his facial features and significantly raises the pitch of his voice, creating an unsettling effect as he navigates a rambling and often disconnected stream of consciousness.
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The Grammy winner began the peculiar series with a statement about his youth, claiming he resided in Alaska between the ages of 17 and 19. He spoke of “Alaska living,” and asserted he would “reel in” fish, managing to catch “a half a dozen on a good day.” This particular assertion stands in contrast to Bieber’s well-documented public life, as the Canadian-born artist achieved worldwide fame by his early teens in 2009, with no prior accounts of such a period in Alaska.
The subsequent videos showed a seemingly troubled and scattered thought process. On the third slide, Bieber stated, “I don’t mean to get in between the stuff you got going on and the people around ya, it’s what we like to say, it’s no buena.”
His conversation continued in the following clips. “Question, you ask around, you say, ‘You’re worried about the what,’ ” he uttered in a brief video on slide four. Slide five initiated a thought that appeared to carry over to slide six: “You’ve been hurt. You’ve been afraid. You have been shut down. But let me tell you a little something,” he said before continuing, “G-o-d. Our boy Jesus, he’s got a plan, and he works all things together for Gucci.” He then added a clarification, “Gucci is what we mean when we mean good.”
A shift in tone followed, with Bieber remarking, “They want to be like a rat, stealing your cheese. Running the little wheel, going crazy, trying to take away every last bit of your sanity.”
The eighth slide featured a frustrated-sounding query about societal expectations: “Are you tired of them telling you, ‘You must become like your older brother Marcus?’ ‘You must become like your older sister Helga?’ ‘You must become like so-and-so that you work with until you retire?’ And you say…,” the video cutting out, a common occurrence throughout the series that added to the disjointed nature of the posts.
Amidst the rambling, Bieber also touched on personal values. Slide nine showed him stating, “I live by two things: loyalty and conviction. Now, let me tell you one thing about loyalty. I’m always there for the people that made me, because that’s just the kind of guy.” He continued this theme in the next slide, urging, “Two things I need you to focus on — it’ll change your whole life — sacrifice and hard work. Are you willing to sacrifice the very bones in your body? I am.”
This sentiment took a more challenging tone in the eleventh video: “For the next man? That’s just what I do. Is that what you would do? I don’t think so.” He then followed up on the twelfth slide: “I live by two truths that’s honor and integrity. Now those two truths, they leave me with this. They leave me with purpose. They leave me with the desire to please. Now I want to please.”
The carousel concluded with a final clip where Bieber said, “I wanna tease ya. I wanna lima bean squeeze ya, but that ain’t the dealio here,” ending as abruptly as the preceding videos.
This latest string of Instagram posts has intensified ongoing speculation regarding Bieber’s mental health. His social media activity in recent months has already been a source of concern, with the singer sharing several vulnerable messages about being “selfish,” stating he “can’t control how I’m gonna feel,” expressing feelings that he’s “getting hit from all angles,” and posting a cryptic note about continuing to “do and say things that hurt others unintentionally.” Tuesday’s unsettling, filtered monologue appears to have only deepened the worries surrounding the pop star’s current condition.
