COURTESY OF MTV

Justin Bieber Solid Gold.

Every year or so I try and find the Justin Bieber double performance of ‘Where Are Ü Now/What Do You Mean?’ at the 2015 MTV VMAs, which is famous for its sense of levitation and the fact that Bieber cried at the end. ‘It’s beautiful’, wrote Eric Sundermann at the time. For a while you could still find it but only by digging around in the MTV website archives. By 2019 it had been removed from all internet archives except bad quality crowd pov YouTube videos and snippets embedded on non-video websites. The 2015 MTV EMAs performance of ‘What Do You Mean?’ is still on the MTV archive, but the EMAs were always a replica of the VMAs on all levels. The memory of the VMA performance is still contained, somehow, in Cedric Madden’s ‘heaven’ from 2017 which was itself deleted in 2020, but which I archived here, and in avril23’s ‘collapse stories’.

The only perfect raw footage that exists is of Bieber crying at the very end of the performance, but even then only a few seconds are saved.