95. Usher - Confessions (Arista, 2004)
“Yeah!” is to me the song of the arrival of HD TV in the UK. It sounds like HD music too, like a sonic Collateral. In a previous review I described trap music as being “808 drums compressed, equalized, mastered and polished to a mirror sheen, arranged in certain rhythms of significance”. The genre of this song, crunk, has the exact same definition, but they're different, right? Trap is a fortress, ramparts around a king, a psycho or a human money printer. Crunk is more like a celeb-studded VIP section. As the biggest crunk song ever recorded, “Yeah!” is the most accommodating VIP section of all, now housing roughly half the world's population and as many ingenious hooks as have ever been packed into such a short runtime: the gustiest bassdrum ever recorded, the Pavlovian bell sounding every 4.5714 seconds, “I'm in the club with my homies”, “Urshur”, “okayyy!”, the “Get Low” callback, the needy little “yeah.” after all those “Yeah!”s, that word that magically turns into a handclap, the little G-funk whistle and that supersaw lead that sounds like a mid 90s Konami game for the Genesis (if you owned Contra: The Hard Corps, Rocket Knight Adventures, Tiny Toons: Buster's Hidden Treasure or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist, you know). It was peak visibility in Europe for both of its co-stars Ludacris and Lil Jon. It's the perfect mix of sexy tension and high joviality, everything that pop music could want to be and God how I wish I were only writing about this song and not this repellent album.
Usher released his debut in 1994. A blend of between-the-silken-sheets slow jams, and “dance” numbers, all of which bump along at a grindin' 90 bpm, it did not do well. America was largely unready for a fifteen year old boy who wanted make love all night long. Follow-up My Way was his first monster hit album, borrowing vocal tricks from Jacko and Bone Thugs to great effect. His lyrics hadn't changed, but his age had. The next one is 8701, it's bigger and slightly worse, largely the fault of too many cooks and their lawyers. On now to Confessions.
The mildly interesting conceit of the title single “Confessions, Pt. 2” is that our sweet boy Usher has gotten his side piece pregnant. All interest flies out the window when we realise nothing real actually happened, at least not to Usher (it supposedly happened to producer Jermaine Dupri). I dislike this track strongly, partially because it is modelled after R. Kelly's “Ignition (Remix)”, replete with the singer/predator/producer's infuriating achronological naming conventions (“Ignition (Remix)” was written five years before “Ignition”), with “Confessions, Pt. 2” appearing after “Confessions (Interlude)” and before “Confessions, Pt. 1”. It's normally the preserve of modern classical and electronic avant garde artists to pull shit like this and it's just as annoying.
What exactly is confessed on this record then? Mostly, it's that Usher finds you attractive and that he would like to sex you good. We're all out of crunk so the whole album is very conventional r'n'b with Usher's talented yet ordinary voice exploring every inch of itself. That's not a confession, that's an hour's filler. The closest we get is the curio “That's What It's Made For”, an ode to his blessed penis, where you at least get the interesting verse: “Game rules, no cap, no cut / But even Superman couldn't turn your love down, I / Slipped up, slipped in / Hey man, what the hell you doing? / Raw dog is a never / I know I know better, hah / Heard her whisper, "don't worry, I'm safe" / Didn't matter 'cause it's already too late / I was lost in the sauce, dead wrong / And I ain't stopping now / Parlaying in the bush again / Didn't think about what I was putting in it”. Foreshadows his both his herpes lawsuit and whatever's about to come his way as Sean Combs' house falls. Note that this album doesn't have an Parental Advisory sticker. Basically none of his records do, cause I guess at his level you can pay 'em off, so long as the big swears don't appear. How do you get to that level? Why did I see a watch with his face made of diamonds in the London Natural History Museum? Why was there a queue? Again, how do you get to that level?
If Usher were a D'n'D character he would have rolled a very high stamina stat. It'd explain the lovemaking, yes, but also how he has managed to endure being given so many awards (he has one for roughly every 40-day period of his life). A seven-album run without a flop and without a five-plus year hiatus, entirely in an era where pop albums have to be promoted harder than live-action Batman films really is something though. Basically only Beyoncé has him beat there. High stamina would also explain how he was able to do a Superbowl Half-Time in 2024 at the age of forty-five. It wasn't exactly Homecoming / Beychella, but I'll say this, he made it to the end of the performance. It's touch and go for a bit.
[NFL love blocking video, but it’s still on YT]
By the time he is halfway through the set (which includes all five singles from Confessions, an album in which I have lost all interest by now), he looks like he's been waterboarded in baby oil and it genuinely looks like he could be experiencing organ failure. Then he disappears for a sec while a guest performer distracts the camera and he returns wearing horrifying amounts of clothes and, oh no are those roller skates? But your bones! Precarity should not be the main spectacle of a performance outside of a circus.
What Kind Of Splash Did It Make?
A splash too big for anyone to see. Culturally not much, besides in South Korea where everyone tried to sing and dance like him for a bit. R. Kelly probably did Trapped In The Closet because of the “Confessions” songs.
Where To Go From Here?
To all Americans offended by this review, I present a peace offering in the form of “U Got It Bad (Soulpower Remix)”, an Usher song that likely wasn't released in the US. Fucking massive in Britain though. Everyone else, throw on My Way, it does the same thing as Confessions while sounding nicer, in about half the time. Charisma over Stamina.