Justin Bieber hits back at critic after lip-syncing during festival performance

Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande have responded to the claims that he lip-synced during their joint performance at this year’s Coachella music festival.

Writer-cum-television personality Morgan Stewart took aim at the Canadian pop star’s vocals on the E! show Nightly Pop recently, as she told her co-hosts Nina Parker and Hunter March that she “didn’t expect [his set] to be that bad” after the trio watched a clip of the show.

The footage clearly sees Bieber’s popular track Sorry kick in seconds before he even moves the microphone to his mouth to start singing.

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The Rich Kid of Beverly Hills alum went on to slam his appearance too, laughing: “‘He definitely looks like he put an Oxy pad on that forehead but I don’t care, that is f**ked up! We all have forehead acne, it’s normal.”

Reacting to Stewart’s scathing comments, Bieber took to Twitter to defend himself and encourage her to spend her time supporting others and bringing positivity rather than mocking people for a quick laugh.

“What hurts about this is the fact that you have a platform to make a difference,” he explained. “And rather than being positive you belittle people. Think about how awesome it felt for me to be on that stage after being away for so long.

“The excitement and joy it gave me doing the thing i love the most, I sang to to backtrack like most cameos do this is a normal thing, and rather than try and make people feel accepted and loved you find things to pick apart like the world isn’t full of that already.

“We can find something negative to say about anything or anyone. When are we gonna be the kind of people that find joy in adding value to one another and not tearing each other apart..”

Grande, who had Bieber join her onstage during her two weeks of headlining, seemed to share a similar sentiment. However, the wording she used was a little more cryptic than Bieber’s…

Addressing the issue on social media, she said: “People are so lost. One day everybody that works at all them blogs will realize how unfulfilled they are and purposeless what they’re doing is and hopefully shift their focus elsewhere. That’s gonna be a beautiful ass day for them! I can’t wait for them to feel lit inside.”

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She also clarified that the pair had only decided to do the duet ten minutes before her set started.

“We had 0 soundcheck, 0 rehearsal. [Justin was] singing with the back tracking like most cameos do. people are bored. people don’t know how it feels to be under such scrutiny. the world was happy to have [Justin] on stage again.”