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. Reid, singing “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men Reid signed Usher to LaFace that day. 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. 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. “I feel like it is the base of everything. “So many people are interested in R&B,” he said in 2004, after selling platinum in a week. Usher’s coming-of-age story gave R&B the sort of widespread appreciation the genre struggled to recreate in the decades that followed. 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. Confessions dropped just three months after Rolling Stone crowned former *NSYNC frontman Justin Timberlake their New King of Pop for siphoning Black music into his solo debut. 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 sold a million copies in its first week at a time when illegal file-sharing had labels frantic over the fate of the industry. 1 hits and reaping the benefits of binding his love life to his music. Usher spent much of 2004 dethroning himself on the pop chart, earning four No. On Confessions, the stars align 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.Īnd so the truth hardly mattered. It’s a craft to turn reality into convenient truth, and it’s special when the material transcends the machine.
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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.
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. But to be worthy of the Michael Jackson-level prestige he coveted, Usher needed a man-in-the-mirror moment. Everyone in America knew the term “Yeah!” not just as an everyday affirmation but as a club smash. He had the catalog, choreography, angelic falsetto, and winning grin necessary to be a star. Usher understood that much of a great pop album is simply telling a good story. “Nobody knows who the fuck Billie Jean is.
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“We wanted the media to ask us questions,” the producer told Vibe in 2014, comparing their artistic license to that of Michael Jackson. II,” a saga about creeping and getting another woman pregnant, was based on Dupri’s life, not Usher’s. The album’s most salacious track, “Confessions Pt. 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. He said he co-wrote the album’s core breakup ballad, “Burn,” while he and Chilli were still together. 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. In constructing the narrative around Confessions, Usher omitted certain facts. But the deception worked on multiple levels.
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