Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Usher’s 2004 album, a jam-packed icon of R&B and one of the most flawless executions of mythmaking in pop.
In 2004, Usher wasn’t yet committed to the idea of marriage, a point he made repeatedly during the press cycle for his fourth album, Confessions, marketed as his most personal project to date. In interviews, he told the same story about his breakup with TLC’s Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, seven years his senior: He’d cheated on her; she’d been pressuring him to settle down; arguments led to fissures, and they eventually split. Chilli hinted at infidelity on the radio but declined to elaborate on the relationship to Vibe or contribute to what she called a “PR move.” Usher said he didn’t view the album as a stunt, even though it was. He described Confessions as autofiction and let the public run with the rumors, which, of course, they did.
But the deception worked on multiple levels. In constructing the narrative around Confessions, Usher omitted certain facts. While it was true that he wasn’t entirely sold on marriage, he told Rolling Stone in 2004 that he did once buy Chilli a 10-karat diamond ring and proposed to her in the most R&B way: in the middle of sex. He said he co-wrote the album’s core breakup ballad, “Burn,” while he and Chilli were still together. A decade later, executive producer Jermaine Dupri said the song was indeed about her but admitted Confessions wasn’t just Usher’s experience, rather a compilation of its male creators’ infractions, promoted as one man’s expunging of sins. The album’s most salacious track, “Confessions Pt. II,” a saga about creeping and getting another woman pregnant, was based on Dupri’s life, not Usher’s. “We wanted the media to ask us questions,” the producer told Vibe in 2014, comparing their artistic license to that of Michael Jackson. “Nobody knows who the fuck Billy Jean is. We’re still looking for her.”
Usher understood that much of a great pop album is simply telling a good story. He had the catalog, choreography, angelic falsetto, and winning grin necessary to be a star. Everyone in America knew the term “Yeah!” not just as an everyday affirmation but as a club smash. But to be worthy of the Michael Jackson-level prestige he coveted, Usher needed a man-in-the-mirror moment. He played up the cheating angle and the rumors and was seemingly forthright about the subject of his ex; and because it worked, he copied that storytelling formula for his subsequent album releases, albeit with less moving results: For 2008’s Here I Stand, he milked his marriage to Tameka Foster for material, and then he made their divorce fodder for his 2010 album Raymond v. Raymond. The ability to draft a persuasive narrative around a project is a skill music fans both scrutinize and take for granted, but the greatest pop stars—Janet Jackson, Taylor Swift, Drake—know how to master the art of packaging. It’s a craft to turn reality into convenient truth, and it’s special when the material transcends the machine. On Confessions, the stars aligning in Usher’s favor: He had a breakup to cope with and an album to make, and the dramatic backdrop gave him the most compelling work of his career.
And so the truth hardly mattered. Usher spent much of 2004 dethroning himself on the pop chart, earning four No. 1 hits and reaping the benefits of binding his love life to his music. Confessions sold a million copies in its first week at a time when illegal file-sharing had labels frantic over the fate of the industry. Usher thrived between two very different eras of pop—the contemporary R&B rush of 2001 and the hybrid R&B of the 2010s, when Drake unleashed his inner lothario and assumed his role as the charts’ new lover boy. Confessions dropped just three months after Rolling Stone crowned a former *NSYNC frontman Justin Timberlake their New King of Pop for siphoning Black music into his solo debut. Though millennial pop had turned swiftly toward boy bands and Britney Spears, one of the top five highest-selling albums of the 2000s is Confessions, a record that sits alongside Boyz II Men and TLC as the only R&B albums to be certified diamond for selling 10 million units. Usher’s coming-of-age story gave R&B the sort of widespread appreciation the genre struggled to recreate in the decades that followed. “So many people are interested in R&B,” he said in 2004, after selling platinum in a week. “I feel like it is the base of everything. I want to make it more prominent.”
Up until that year, Usher was a king in training, a heartthrob with washboard abs, a protégé of Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds’ legendary LaFace Records. Usher Raymond IV, a former choir boy, had started out performing in talent shows in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee before his mother moved the family to Atlanta. At 14, he auditioned for L.A. Reid, singing “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men; Reid signed Usher to LaFace that day. The label put him to work recording his debut in a hedonistic environment with Sean “Puffy” Combs (Usher mentioned seeing at least one orgy) and producers like Jodeci’s DeVante Swing. Having launched his career with adult love songs, Usher was ahead of his peers at 15, singing, “Can you get wit’ it/It’s like that/It’s only a sexual thing,” on his 1994 self-titled debut. He had the tender pedigree of a Tevin Campbell, but he was an old soul who embraced a level of showmanship that could veer toward hokey. He skated across stages with the grace of a swan, and he was charming and shameless enough to pull off tricks like dropping his pants mid-pop-lock to reveal his boxers. More important, he was technically gifted and unmatched as a dancer.
While the dexterous moves set him up as a natural heir apparent to MJ, Usher modeled his soul music after the likes of Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye. “They’re all great emotional singers who used their experiences in life for the music,” Usher said in a 2004 interview. “You live, you learn and you can sing about it.” Confessions is his portrait of a man contemplating his own deceit and trying to sing his way out of it in under an hour and a half. Star producers like Dupri, Bryan-Michael Cox, Just Blaze, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis create layers of moonlit soul and slow jams that sound like bodies gliding over satin. Yet Confessions didn’t come across as the type of artificial growth many artists try to muster up to prove the worthiness of a new record. Usher really did have something to say—as in, he was actually confessing; it’s just that there were fifty-leven people in the booth with him.
Building on the party-life mood of his third album, 8701, Confessions treats vulnerability as a rite of passage to true partnership and sex as an act linked to lies. The storyline is solidified in “Confessions Pt. II,” a musical telenovela that holds the album’s core thesis about living with a guilty conscience. Usher weighs the options of honesty or silence and talks himself through choosing the former, rationalizing that, “If I’m gonna tell it, then I gotta tell it all.” He cycles through hurt and regret for the love he let go, offering hints of remorse that give the album dimension. The Just Blaze track “Throwback,” which samples Dionne Warwick’s “You’re Gonna Need Me,” finds Usher in a loop of distress over the former love of his life: “Heartbroken when you left my world/Man, I wish I would’ve kept my girl.” But on “Truth Hurts,” he treats a partner like a plaintiff (“I got reason to believe/That you been fooling around…”) and then admits to being driven into suspicion by his own infidelity.
Usher established himself as a hitmaker with 1997’s “Nice & Slow,” a ballad of pure libido. He went No. 1 again with 8701’s charismatic lead single “U Remind Me,” which won him his first Grammy, and then “U Got It Bad.” For his fourth album, he wanted another slow-tempo setup, but “Yeah!” was just the explosion Confessions needed leading up to its release. In Atlanta, Lil Jon was signal-boosting crunk by shouting at the same decibel as a drill instructor, and Usher’s new label, Arista, was looking for a club single. “Yeah!”—with Usher’s smooth narration, Lil Jon’s shrill adlibs, and Ludacris playing the inappropriate wingman—spent 12 consecutive weeks at No. 1. Usher was reluctant to even record it. He preferred the sensitive centerpiece “Burn,” a ballad co-produced by Dupri and Cox that opens with a dramatic swoosh, then a cradle of solemn chords. “Let it burn” was the final, indefinite stage of grief: “I know I made a mistake/Now it’s too late,” Usher sings. “I know she ain’t coming back.” His tone is rich with vitality, lust, or dejection as needed. As Dupri told Complex in 2014, “That’s what it feels like to me when I listen to the song, like somebody’s crying.”
Of Confessions’ original 17 tracks (the deluxe version adds four new titles, including the doe-eyed Alicia Keys duet “My Boo”), the less celebrated songs aren’t so much filler as they are hidden treats obscured by the album’s most transcendent moments. Few sounds are more disarming than an Usher falsetto, at its most melting on songs like “Can U Handle It?” (which Robin Thicke co-wrote) and “Do It to Me,” among a handful of after-hours cuts that find him trapped between temptation and partnership; “Simple Things” is a syrupy lecture on the value of listening to women’s needs. The album’s latter half propels the narrative, turning Usher’s inner monologue into soulful pep talks. On “That’s What It’s Made For,” he worries about the consequences of having unprotected sex (the baby from “Confessions Pt. II”?) singing, “I slipped up, slipped in.” The track opens with Usher declaring, over stealthy keys, “Listen, I got a story to tell.”
In 2020, Usher is still in the business of selling transparency. In a September interview promoting his single “Bad Habits,” a song about being bad at love, he talked about the benefits of therapy and cited Confessions as an inflection point in both his career and personal life. “At the end, can you judge me for being direct with you, the person whom I have to be in this relationship with?” he says, addressing a fictional partner, but maybe also his fans. “I’m gonna let you know who I am. And in the end, you choose to stay or you choose to leave. But you’re gonna know who I am.” For him, honesty ushered in growth and success, and it led to one of the most flawless executions of mythmaking in pop.
0 comments:
Post a Comment