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Pop Music
Usher 2.0
One of the last big pop stars tries adulthood.
by Sasha Frere-Jones
June 2, 2008 Text Size:
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No catharsis here: Usher has stripped out the pain audible in the work of so many great male soul singers.

Keywords
Usher; “Here I Stand”; “Confessions”; Singers; Rhythm & Blues; Patton, Jonetta; “Yeah;” Usher’s 2004 album, “Confessions,” which has sold nine and a half million copies, may turn out to have been the last true blockbuster in pop music. Since 2000, only five albums have sold more copies. “Confessions” sold 1.1 million in its first week, and contained four No. 1 singles. For a while, “Confessions” was pop music. Nine and a half million was a big number even in 2004; now, in a music market whose rules are changing by the day, it’s the new eleventy billion.

Usher was brought up to succeed in pop music the way some kids are brought up to compete in the Olympics—very different from an artist stumbling on his own voice by dint of involuntary, obsessive experiment. Everything about his output seems to have come from a focus group, including his abdominal muscles. Brought to Atlanta from Chattanooga by his manager-mother, Jonetta Patton, he was signed at the age of fourteen and ended up in New York as the youngest member of the entertainment battalion led by Sean Combs. He started releasing records at fifteen, and though he is filed first as an R. & B. artist, he is equally well known for singing feathery ballads that fit into the genre inaccurately named Adult Contemporary. His songs balance on a moral and formal fulcrum: salacious stories and club beats over here, vows to reform and slow, throaty singing over there. It’s the Saturday-night, Sunday-morning dichotomy. His records are fun the way pop music is fun; they share the same contours, priorities, and boundaries. The pleasures are rarely raw, surprising, or complex, but they are reliable, and there is an easy glow in the sureness of the execution. A reasonably attractive, small man with very little body fat, he is a nimble but anonymous singer and a fantastically crisp, even fussy, dancer.

Usher’s songs strive for as wide a demographic as possible, and his personal story—as recounted endlessly in entertainment magazines—hews to whatever product he is currently hawking. His memories are market-based. Speaking to a reporter in 2004 about his friend David Beckham, Usher said, “He’s great at what he does. His P.R. is great,” as if the two might be indistinguishable. When confronted, in the same interview, with rumors that Beckham had possibly cheated on his wife, Usher responded, “He’s cheating on her? That happens, man. Everybody’s confessing nowadays,” deftly converting what might be upsetting news about a close friend into a promotional reference to his then new album. In the course of “Confessions,” Usher sang about both infidelity and fathering an illegitimate child. (In interviews, he denies the latter.)

As music, “Confessions” was a diverting, glossy series of apologies and whispery shouts. (Usher’s voice is seamless and coherent even when he empties his lungs.) The album presented a sinner who didn’t seem particularly upset by his own sins. Its first single, “Yeah!,” was an uncomplicated song about flirting with girls in a night club; it left plenty of air-conditioned space for Usher to coo and for the producer Lil Jon to bark the interjections (“O.K.!,” “Yeah!”) that earned him a parody on “Chappelle’s Show.” The lyrics were delivered like flashes of light: brief, anxious, and exciting, and perfectly suited to a voice that is long on control and short on texture. Texture, and a welcome dose of humor, came from the rapper Ludacris, who turned “birthday suit”—slang your grandmother could use—into a filthy hoot. To stay at No. 1 for twelve weeks, as “Yeah!” did, you must sound salacious but not dirty, and keep it simple enough to lure out the non-dancers, who can latch on to a phrase or word that they already know: yeah!


from the issuecartoon banke-mail this“Confessions Part II,” also a No. 1 single, was another instance of Usher’s knack for taking potentially convulsive themes—sex, infidelity, guilt, telephone calls—and reducing them to titillation. It was Usher in his quieter mode, though the song’s beat is like the spare thump of “Yeah!” slowed down and reduced in size, wisely suspended between the dance floor and the couch. Usher narrated the act of confessing, singing about “racing” to tell his girlfriend that not only did he cheat on her (that was Part I) but he fathered a child with the “chick on the side.” Lightness is Usher’s main, and perhaps only, gift. “Confessions Part II” was “One Life to Live,” not “Scenes from a Marriage,” and that may explain those nine and a half million records. If Usher is considered part of soul and R. & B., he is a quiet revolutionary, stripping out the pain audible in the work of so many great male soul singers: Otis Redding, Michael Jackson, Luther Vandross, R. Kelly. Catharsis has no place in Usher’s work, no matter the topic. The blood is all offstage, and Usher plays our Greek chorus, moralizing and reporting. It’s an easier gig than having to do the wet work. (R. & B. after “Confessions” has continued in this denatured, slight vein, from the cyborg come-ons of Ciara to Chris Brown’s Usher-lite routine.)

Usher’s new album, “Here I Stand,” is the work of a newlywed. The challenge here is to convince us that he is a married and responsible man—grown and sexy, as R. & B. for people over thirty has come to be called—without sacrificing the louche, frictionless sense of play that made him famous. Now the singer whose catalogue is based on cheating, flirting, breaking up, and apologizing is forced to stay in place, to rhyme with his press kit, and the dissonance undoes his modest gifts.