“You Make Me Wanna…” has a beat driven by herky-jerk drum programming and staccato gasps, and its acoustic guitar sounds like something that the liquid metal Terminator might play while sitting around a campfire. Usher effectively introduced that new sound, which would become the new sound of both pop and R&B in the years ahead, with “You Make Me Wanna…,” the lead single from My Way. Even at his most passionate, he sounds blithe, unconcerned. Instead, he glides with a mechanistic efficiency. He does melismatic runs, too, but they never sound effortful. Usher sometimes delivers his lyrics a little bit like a rapper, in dense clusters of syllables. Usher sings a lot about sex, and his voice sounds tender and frictionless. Tracks hover weightless, sometimes getting into a tamer version of the jittery stop-start production that Timbaland was injecting into the pop charts at the time.
Usher nice and slow full#
The record is full of pianos and acoustic guitars, but those instruments never feel real. Together, they figured out a sound that fit Usher much better than the Puffy approach. After its release, Usher’s mother put him back on the talent-show circuit in Atlanta.Īfter that first album bricked, Usher developed a rapport with Atlanta figurehead Jermaine Dupri, who produced most of his sophomore album My Way. Its biggest hit, the Puffy/Chucky Thompson production “Think Of You,” went top 10 on the R&B charts, but it only reached #58 on the Hot 100.
Relative to its expectations, though, the album fell flat. Puff Daddy was an executive producer, and lots of big songwriters and producers worked on the record: Faith Evans, Donnell Jones, Jodeci’s DeVante Swing. Usher’s self-titled 1994 debut was positioned as a big deal. You never knew what was going to happen.” (I really enjoy the phrase “sex is so hot in the industry, man.”) You’d open a door and see somebody doing it, or several people in a room having an orgy. Sex is so hot in the industry, man… There was always girls around. Years later, Usher told Rolling Stone that his time in Puff’s “Flavor Camp” was the hardest stretch of his career: “Puff introduced me to a totally different set of shit - sex, specifically.
The idea was that Puff Daddy would take Usher under his wing and help him craft a persona. The next year, LA Reid sent Usher to New York. The song made a slight dent in the R&B charts, and it didn’t get anywhere near the Hot 100. The 15-year-old Usher’s debut single “Call Me A Mack” came out as part of the soundtrack to the 1993 film Poetic Justice, and it’s a clear attempt to tap into whatever was left of the new jack swing wave. “Nice & Slow,” Ursh’s first chart-topper, was a space-age sex-jam, and many more would follow. Even as a teenager, Usher was a titan in waiting. That first chart conquest took Usher a little while, but it was going to happen. Even in this situation - a few years after his last #1 hit, slumming through a sort of hipster publicity stunt - the Usher I saw was the same glowing kid who’d first topped the Hot 100 in the early days of 1998. Instead, he was simply Usher, and the members of this great band simply faded into fuzzy shapes behind him. Usher didn’t make a particularly convincing indie rock frontman, but he didn’t really try.
The headliners that night were the Afghan Whigs, and Usher came out at the end of their set to sing a few songs with them. Nine years ago, I was at the FADER Fort at SXSW, and Usher was a surprise guest. Very few people were born to be pop stars, but Usher was one of them. All of those images turn into gauzy, sexy music-video scenarios. Try this: Close your eyes and picture Usher as a carpenter or a college professor or a dentist. Pop stardom is always a matter of timing and circumstances, but when you see Usher, it’s hard to imagine an alternate universe in which this guy is anything other than a pop star. When he dances, it’s like he’s gliding sideways across the surface of a lake. Have you ever seen Usher Raymond IV in person? He doesn’t seem real. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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