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Here’s How Justin Bieber Reacted to Not Seeing ‘Queen’ Rihanna Perform Her Own Songs at Karaoke

The "Umbrella" singer had performed several songs from Anti.

Rihanna and Justin Bieber pose in the audience during the 2011 Billboard Music Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena May 22, 2011 in Las Vegas.

Rihanna and Justin Bieber pose in the audience during the 2011 Billboard Music Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena May 22, 2011 in Las Vegas.

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Justin Bieber is just as bummed as fans are that he didn’t get to see Rihanna‘s latest impromptu performance.

Over the weekend, RiRi made a pitstop at Manhattan’s Girls Love Karaoke, where she took over the stage to perform “Needed Me” and “Sex With Me” from her 2016 album Anti.


“Missed seein u sing Queen,” he wrote on his Instagram Story Friday (Jan. 3) with the goat, crown and shocked reaction emojis over a clip he reshared of his Def Jam labelmate performing “Needed Me.”

“Don’t do too much because, you know, I got five minutes. My battery’s about to burn out. There’s a lot of cameras. I didn’t come here for this s–t,” Rihanna said in a video recap of the event posted to Girls Love Karaoke’s Instagram.

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The last time the “Work” hitmaker delivered a full concert was in March, when she performed during the pre-wedding celebration for Anant Ambani, the son of Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, and Radhika Merchant in Jamnagar, India. It was the first time she put on a full show since her Anti World Tour in 2016. Coincidentally, Bieber performed at another of the same couple’s pre-wedding celebration months later, marking the “Sorry” singer’s first performance since he canceled the remainder of his Justice World Tour in 2023 due to health concerns.

Both superstars have been quiet on the music front and have prioritized starting their own families, but Rihanna previously teased that she and her partner A$AP Rocky have been cooking up something new. “I already got stuff that I feel like I could make hits out of,” she told Entertainment Tonight in April. “Me and Rocky are really trying to figure out who’s gonna use what because it’s so good.”

This article was first published by Billboard U.S.

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Rheostatics. Back L to R: Tim Vesely, Don Kerr, Kevin Hearn, Dave Bidini, Alex Lifeson Front L to R: Dave Clark, Hugh Marsh
Chris Wahl

Rheostatics. Back L to R: Tim Vesely, Don Kerr, Kevin Hearn, Dave Bidini, Alex Lifeson Front L to R: Dave Clark, Hugh Marsh

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Alex Lifeson on New Music With Rheostatics: ‘There Are No Rules or Expectations’

The all-star collective's new album, The Great Lakes Suite, also features Laurie Anderson and the late Gord Downie.

Thirty years ago, Toronto’s Rheostatics went high-concept with Music Inspired by the Group of Seven, a National Gallery of Canada commission to pay homage to early 20th century Canadian landscape painters. It was an arty and abstract conceptual piece, incorporating free-form composition and recorded dialogue from the painters and historical figures such as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

Ever since then, the band’s Dave Bidini tells Billboard, “We’ve always bandied about, ‘How can we do something like that again?’ So we’ve been searching for a while, and one night I literally had my head on the pillow, and I thought about the Great Lakes.”

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