The pleasures are rarely raw, surprising, or complex, but they are reliable, and there is an easy glow in the sureness of the execution. His records are fun the way pop music is fun they share the same contours, priorities, and boundaries. It’s the Saturday-night, Sunday-morning dichotomy. His songs balance on a moral and formal fulcrum: salacious stories and club beats over here, vows to reform and slow, throaty singing over there. artist, he is equally well known for singing feathery ballads that fit into the genre inaccurately named Adult Contemporary.
He started releasing records at fifteen, and though he is filed first as an R. Brought to Atlanta from Chattanooga by his manager-mother, Jonetta Patton, he was signed at the age of fourteen and ended up in New York as the youngest member of the entertainment battalion led by Sean Combs. Everything about his output seems to have come from a focus group, including his abdominal muscles.
Usher was brought up to succeed in pop music the way some kids are brought up to compete in the Olympics-very different from an artist stumbling on his own voice by dint of involuntary, obsessive experiment. Nine and a half million was a big number even in 2004 now, in a music market whose rules are changing by the day, it’s the new eleventy billion. For a while, “Confessions” was pop music. “Confessions” sold 1.1 million in its first week, and contained four No. Since 2000, only five albums have sold more copies. Usher’s 2004 album, “Confessions,” which has sold nine and a half million copies, may turn out to have been the last true blockbuster in pop music.