Given his status as one of the most commercially successful R&B artists of all time (with more than 100 million sales worldwide), it’s difficult to picture a scenario where Usher – full name Usher Raymond IV – isn’t doing the two-step dance on a massive stage or flashing that trademark baby-faced grin to an endless crowd of adoring female fans.
Essentially the Aristotle of baby-making music, Usher has been a dominant force on the charts for the best part of 30 years, with his angelic falsetto and ubiquitous hits (U Remind Me, My Way, Yeah) cementing the 44-year-old as both an archetype for the vulnerable contemporary male pop superstar and that rare Lothario who sounds endearing even when he’s singing syrupy harmonies (check 2023 single Boyfriend) about stealing your girlfriend. Yet things weren’t always so easy for this iconic singer and dancer.
Usher recalls a childhood spent in Chattanooga, Tennessee: a place where, back in 1980 (less than two years after he was born), four Black women leaving a local nightclub were injured in a racially motivated attack by KKK members carrying out a drive-by shooting. “My parents tried to insulate me from experiencing the confining realities of being a Black person in the South,” Usher says when we sit down together the day after a gig in Paris, halfway through his residency there. “But I still remember those people who felt entitled to call me a n*****, and seeing the white kids enjoying favouritism from teachers during basketball games at school.
“These are things that Black people still feel in America to this day,” he continues. “The entitlement to be racist goes all the way back to [infamous slave owner] King Leopold II and the heinous reality of the colonisation of a continent that brought Black people over to America. No matter how much we claim there’s fair treatment of people of colour in America today: there still isn’t. Progress starts with a recognition of our history. We can’t truly move forward until we understand, and acknowledge, our past.”
These experiences, which occurred decades before Usher was announced as the coveted headliner of the looming Super Bowl 2024 half-time show, are a powerful reminder of his humble beginnings and the relatable human being behind all those slow dance songs that were the soundtrack to so many first kisses. In Paris – where sold-out shows have incorporated sticky pole dancing, energetic roller skating, and the singer belting out 2004 hit Confessions while endless sweat dripped down his ripped torso – the softly spoken Usher I meet in a luxury apartment in the City of Love seems in a particularly reflective mood.
“When I was growing up and wanted to become a vocalist, I would look through my mother’s cassettes and try to imitate the high pitch vocals of her favourite singers like Freddie Jackson and David Peaston,” he says, smiling. “Every day around the time we would be let out for school, the radio would play That Girl by Stevie Wonder, and I would run to the top of the hill so I got enough signal to listen. I would be in the streets dancing and popping, singing all Stevie’s lyrics at the top of my lungs. There was something special about the way that song made me feel.”
The Raymond family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, when Usher turned 12, and two years later the teenager was signed by LaFace Records (also the home of TLC, OutKast, and Toni Braxton), where he was desperate to replicate the magic Stevie Wonder had made him feel. Yet the label didn’t instantly believe in this young singer, sending him off to New York City to become the mentee of Sean “P Diddy” Combs, who was then a fast-rising A&R for Uptown Records.
Look closely at an early video of rap legends The Notorious B.I.G., Diddy, and 2Pac sharing a stage while performing the former’s breakout hit, Party & Bullshit, at the Palladium, and you can see a 14-year-old Usher dancing in the background among their chaotic posse.
“I was just a kid from Tennessee, so experiencing [Biggie and 2Pac] was mind-blowing. Diddy was the one who taught me how to incorporate hip hop with R&B. Maybe 1994’s Can You Get With It was too x-rated for a 14-year old to sing, but Diddy showed me I had to be more ratchet, and that kid who was unafraid to get into some shit. As hip hop and R&B merged, I guess I was the baby for the whole movement.”
Over subsequent years Usher perfected this formula, with now classic R&B records like 2001’s 8701 and 2004’s Diamond-selling Confessions solidifying him as one of the most recognisable pop stars on the planet. Yes, these projects were filled with infectious, bass-heavy slow jams, but central to their success was also Usher’s fearlessness around exorcising his demons and singing from a place of vulnerability; something he said he learned from a childhood spent in the church choir.
On Confessions Part II he tenderly sang about cheating, that song’s protagonist agonising after getting a woman who is not his long-term girlfriend pregnant. On UK number one hit Burn, he belted out the purgative lyrics: “I’m twisted cause one side is telling me that I need to move on / on the other side, I want to break down and cry.”
“For me R&B has to serve the people,” he says. “R&B is the thing to service you when you need to cry; when you need to make love; or when you want to feel excited about life. Honesty is everything too. As a kid crying wasn’t an option. As a Black man in America, period, crying still isn’t an option. So it wasn’t like that was an easy thing for me to do [with the music]. But songs like She’s Out Of My Life by Michael Jackson made it super cool to be vulnerable and put it into the music.”
On February 9, Usher will release his ninth studio album, Coming Home. On mischievous new single, Good Good (featuring Summer Walker and 21 Savage), he displays clear growth, singing about staying friends at the end of a doomed romance and breaking a toxic cycle where “usually my exes turn to enemies”. Beyond this obvious maturation from his days as a petty heartbreaker, having watched him perform the night before we meet, I was struck by just how much of a spring he still had in his step. To paraphrase a lyric from his song Superstar, it was as if he was a 13-year-old kid again.
As he moves closer to this new record’s release date, as well as that much-hyped Super Bowl performance, Usher agrees that he is feeling re-energised: “There’s something new about this space that I’m in right now. I am now an independent artist [for the first time], so I am approaching the music with that energy and playfulness like it’s the first time again and I’m only just breaking through. I feel young when I’m on the stage.”
There’s also something full circle about the fact the 2024 Super Bowl is being held in Las Vegas. His residency in Sin City that started in 2022 was a catalyst that re-ignited his love for music. His upcoming Super Bowl performance, he says, like his Paris shows, will be a love letter to his hometown of Atlanta and the city’s strip club culture.
“Historically, Paris was a place where the burlesque shows and the brothels and the speakeasies were the places that hosted the improvisational jazz musicians,” he says. “Well, in Atlanta, the strip club Magic City is our very own Moulin Rouge. It’s our place to be free and for the artists to debut our music to real people; it’s no different than the duke joints from the Prohibition Era. The lemon pepper chicken wings are great at Magic City, too! I want to tie all these things together.”
He also hopes his Super Bowl performance will have a moment just as iconic as the late Prince’s half-time show in 2007, where the skies opened up during a rendition of Purple Rain. “We all knew God was a fan of Prince when that happened. You couldn’t have curated a better moment,” he adds.
Whether the revitalisation of Usher’s career continues or not, his impact on the world of R&B and pop (Usher helped discover Justin Bieber) will remain undeniable. And, as you’d expect from an artist whose career has been built around establishing himself as the Black Casanova, Usher (who has four children) finds his thoughts returning to matters of the heart as our conversation winds down. On the underrated deep cut, Follow Me, he sang about how fame forces you to smile even when you don’t want to, and he admits the challenge has always been finding a partner who understands the always-on nature of celebrity.
“Welcome to my life,” he laughs when I ask about rarely getting a chance to frown. “People have this expectation that you will always smile and, when you are a famous personality, that then becomes a responsibility bigger than yourself. Maybe I enjoy driving myself more, but it’s safer to be driven. The challenge is finding a woman who understands all of [these pressures], and is still willing to come be with me. It’s like Marvin Gaye said: ‘Come live with me, angel.’”
And as the biggest performance of his career looms ever closer, it seems like that trademark smile isn’t going anywhere.
Usher plays the Superbowl LVIII Halftime Show on Sunday, February 11
