This Goes Out To U 🎤

Super Bowl recap.

Hello from Hung Up headquarters where it’s just kinda been “Burn” and “16 Carriages” on a loop for the last seven hours. Reminder: Rose and I are doing a Don’t Worry Darling watch tomorrow night. Join us!

Can you ever just hear a photograph? Usher performs at the Apple Music Super Bowl LVIII Halftime Show in Las Vegas. (Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Roc Nation)

Spotlights, big stage, fifty thousand fans screamin' in a rage …¹ There is only one way Usher’s Super Bowl Halftime Show would’ve satisfied me completely, and that’s if the “rated U for Usher” warning appeared onscreen, and then Usher knocked on my friend Peyton’s door as we were watching the football game, and if Usher sprouted wings and flew us bareback to the city of Las Vegas, and if Usher sat us down front row, and if Usher took the stage to perform his Las Vegas residency show in its entirety, but if Usher changed the setlist so that “Love In This Club” was not the fifth song, but the finale, and I sang along like I was at church, because Won’t He Do It.

But what happened Sunday night was an entertaining compromise. Usher is an artist of moments, spectacle, partying, and showmanship; his Halftime Show would be deliriously over the top. He brought everything out of Vegas’s archives short of Ginger McKenna and Siegfried and Roy. 

“The hardest part is trying to figure out how to squeeze it all in when you actually have a large catalog,” Usher said ahead of Sunday’s show, “or a lot of records people celebrate and love.” A lot of people don’t have that problem.² The sequencing was great — starting with “Caught Up” was a delight! — but I will always prefer a pared-down show over one stuffed with snippets of songs.³ “Spotlight” and “Love in this Club” are such fucking good songs. “Confessions Pt II” was shortchanged, but “Burn” moved me to tears. By “U Got It Bad” my brain leaves my body, I am just a girl, standing in front of an album she has been listening to for her entire life, and Usher is taking off his shirt, and [redacted]. This man! This music!

There is not another Usher, and he’s often taken for granted. (The fact that he had to appeal for a Halftime Show alone…) Here is a man who believes in putting on a show, who offers himself up to be devoured by women, who can pull his nostalgia into the present without trying to just recreate the past. (From my GQ profile of Usher from last year: ‘I don’t want to make Coming to America 2, I don’t wanna do that,’ he says. ‘What was done is done. 8701? There will not be an 8702.’ That hasn’t stopped him from having fun with it, though; he’s happy to spread his arms out like horny Jesus, sacrificing himself to wipe away our sins.”)

Usher’s voice sounds richer than it ever has, and more elastic. But on Sunday night he was frequently out of breath. He was shaking and sliding and skating; the mic doesn’t always need to be on. (When did lip-syncing at performances of this scale become so dirty? Performances are magic tricks. Use the magic!)