How do you steal the show when you are the show? That was the unprecedented pop culture riddle that Usher found himself stepping into during halftime at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas on Sunday, the resurgent R&B superstar performing for the biggest audience of his platinum-selling life, yet still trying to draw our collective focus away from the centripetal human attention vortex sitting up in the skyboxes, one Taylor Swift.
It should hurt your brain to be reminded that Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has only lasted five short months considering all the ways in which this omni-romance seems to have damaged everyone else’s — especially the tiny, desiccated brains of right-wing media personalities who believe that a bland crossing of celebrity stars is, in fact, a sinister plot hatched deep inside the Pentagon. For Usher, the perversity of the circ*mstances transformed his halftime task into something beyond formidable. Without appearing to affirm the whiny grunting of assorted high-profile MAGA zombies, he needed to make society forget that he was the second most famous singer in the building.
So he did it by confirming he was the best, his voice seemingly made out of elastic, silk, smoke and sunshine. You had to listen for it, though. This halftime show was a blitz of retinal maximalism with a meticulous protagonist at its center, singing and dancing with exactitude and purpose, working hard to cram more than a dozen songs into just as many minutes. If you were keeping a tally, the message was clear: Usher has hits. Also: Usher has friends. Alicia Keys appeared for a cute duet of “My Boo.” Longtime collaborator Jermaine Dupri materialized to play hype man. H.E.R. and Will.i.am were there, too. During the shriek-and-boom of his boisterous curtain closer, “Yeah,” Usher was flanked by Lil Jon and Ludacris, shouting out his Atlanta stomping grounds to the rest of the planet: “I took the world to the A!”
For Usher, outdoing himself is the only way forward
It goes without saying that Usher had been preparing for this — if not from the moment his singing first turned heads in nearby church pews during his Tennessee childhood, then from his tween years in the Atlanta talent show scene where powerful music biz forces began steering him toward fame as if it were preordained. He became a teenage heartthrob, then a wholly respectable R&B artist, then something of a generational talent with the 2004 release of “Confessions,” a masterstroke of an album about the sloppy geometry of love triangles and the shape of R&B to come.
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What happened next? “I’m not in competition with anyone but myself,” Usher told a reporter at the height of “Confessions,” delivering a prophecy that shook out two different ways. In the short term, he fell from pop’s apex, releasing serviceable radio hits and appearing on NBC’s “The Voice.” But in 2021, he turned his focus inward, launching a splashy Las Vegas residency where his ramped-up showmanship became the stuff of enthusiastic digital blab and incessant memes. With smarts and discipline, Usher treated this new hype factory more like a training facility. He was finally in true competition with himself, and night after night, the competition became more exponentially steep. By the end of his “My Way” residency last year, he didn’t sound like he’d been reviving his career so much as perfecting himself.
Usher has more to show for those countless hours of Las Vegas refinement than landing this halftime gig, too. On Friday, he dropped his ninth studio album, “Coming Home,” an expansive and scrupulous trove of R&B songs that allow the 45-year-old to bend his voice in unexpected directions (he channels Billy Joel and Young Thug within the space of a few minutes) and then back toward wholly welcome ones (consistent “Confessions”-era precision). Recounting the soft ache of an amicable breakup on “Good Good,” his finely-sculpted phrasing communicates total emotional control. During “On the Side,” he’s retracing his signature love triangles, but the edges feel cleaner, the angles sharper. Just about everything else on “Coming Home” sounds every bit as expert, too, but the album ultimately feels playful, every syllable seemingly sung through a smile.
Any of these new songs would have sounded fabulous and fitting at the Super Bowl, too, but Usher stuck to his signatures, supplying some of them in captivating one-two punches. He sang “Caught Up” and “U Don’t Have to Call” with pulse-hurrying zest (sunshine, elastic). He sang “Burn” and “U Got It Bad” with elegant gravity (smoke, silk). And by the time he got to the serotonin surge of “OMG” he was doing laps around the stage on roller skates — a highlight from his Vegas show; now a highlight in the Super Bowl halftime history books. If it looked like the whole world was sliding beneath his feet it was because he was on top of it.
