Usher Wants To Make R&B Great Again

 

Over the summer, I saw Diana Ross in concert at the Hollywood Bowl. When she got to her 1980 single “Upside Down,” there was a surprise in store — she spotted Usher in the audience and asked him to join her onstage. You don’t ignore the Supreme of Disco and R&B, and so Usher obliged. He danced and sang to “Upside Down” with her, sending the crowd into an uproar. How could you not, with two icons on stage?

In 1991, at the age of 13, Usher competed on Star Search, as so many of our greatest pop stars have — from Aaliyah and Beyoncé to Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys. He was noticed by an A&R rep from LaFace Records, who put him in front of L.A. Reid, who signed Usher on the spot. After a debut on the Poetic Justice soundtrack, his first album bowed in 1994. Usher, while good, didn’t quite kick off Usher’s career of dominating the charts. The album that did that would be 1997’s My Way, whose lead single, “You Make Me Wanna …” jumped to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and whose second single, “Nice & Slow,” became Usher’s first No. 1.
Usher has always had the soul of R&B infused in him. Speaking on his hit album 8701 with MTV News in 2001, he said, “Lyrically, 8701 is my soul. … I was inspired by love and heartache. I listen to a lot of Donny Hathaway’s, Stevie Wonder’s, Marvin Gaye’s, and Michael Jackson’s earlier records, those Motown greats. There’s a little bit of all of that in the album. I really appreciate what music was back then, as well as in the early ’90s when you had artists like Troop and Jodeci, and Michael Jackson was in his prime.”
My understanding of sexuality as a black male often came from the media I consumed, and there was nothing more beautiful in the early 2000s than the unapologetically black Usher singing about love, relationships, and heartaches. On days when I could be ridiculed for the supposed femininity that came with listening to Aaliyah, hearing Usher croon “Damn, I loved you, you were my girl” and “You don’t have to call, it’s OK, girl / ’Cause I’m gonna be all right tonight” on my personal favorite, “U Don’t Have to Call,” helped reaffirm the romantic sensitivity that it was possible for a man to possess.

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Twenty-five years after that Star Search performance, Usher is releasing his eighth studio album, Hard II Love. The album goes on sale today, but it’s been streaming exclusively for Tidal listeners for a week. On the eve of that Tidal release, the service hosted an exclusive listening session in Downtown Los Angeles at the Theatre at Ace Hotel, hosted by rapper Big Boi, who interviewed Usher about each of the tracks on his new album.
So calming is the mere presence of Usher that the chaos of the event melted away the moment he entered. The crowd was packed into the theater’s lobby for nearly an hour and a half before being let inside to take seats. But Usher walking out on stage to the sound of adoring fans screaming his name was enough to wash away any lingering annoyance.
Before discussing his new music, he addressed the elephant in the room: the album cover, which drew mixed reactions when it debuted. To this, Usher simply said, “The art is left to interpretation. We can become calloused by the experiences we go through.” Designed by artist Daniel Arsham, the cover is part of a sculpture of Usher’s body that involved him being covered with materials for three hours without the ability to see or hear. The end result, though it looks very little like Usher, is meant to signify how we’re often “hardened” by love, and some of the scars stay with us.