USHER CAUGHT UP GENRE HOW TO

Jonathan Smith grew up middle class in Atlanta.

But “Yeah!,” the eventual first single, eclipsed everything else.) Confessions would send a bunch of songs, including “Burn,” to #1. (In the end, both Usher and his label people were proven right. At that point, when you needed an anthem, Lil Jon was the person that you called. They knew “Burn” was a good song, and potentially a big song, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that would jump out of the speakers and kick somebody’s head off. Usher had wanted to release “Burn” as the first single from Confessions, but the people at his label were concerned. Usher submitted 40 finished songs to Arista, his label, and LA Reid, the label’s new boss, told him that the album wasn’t done. So Usher, playing up on his tabloid relationship, had recorded all these tender and emotive songs about what it’s like to fuck up a good thing because you can’t help yourself. Usher and TLC’s Chilli had broken up after a couple of years of dating, and the world knew that it was because Usher cheated. Two and a half years after 8701, Usher got together with his longtime collaborator Jermaine Dupri to make an R&B album about relationships and infidelities and temptations. Usher thought that he’d finished recording Confessions, the album that would go down as his masterpiece. Suddenly, you could become a pop star just by screaming over one-finger keyboard riffs. It was happening right in front of our faces. But when “Yeah!” was on top, the change was immediate and undeniable. Sometimes, you have to look back to figure out which pop songs changed the game and helped shape history. “Yeah!” was the right song at the right time, the track that connected emergent underground trends with gleaming pop hooks and effectively recalibrated the sound of uptempo pop music. By teaming up with a club-friendly R&B singer who’d been a pop star for years, Lil Jon supercharged his sound, and he helped introduce the album that became one of the last true mainstream pop blockbusters - a Thriller for the post-Napster era. Lil Jon had already made hits before “Yeah!” became 2004’s biggest song, and his party-up roar was already omnipresent in clubs and on rap radio. Years later, I still can’t believe he pulled it off.

USHER CAUGHT UP GENRE HOW TO

But Lil Jon figured out how to turn crunk into pop music, and he helped bring about a cultural sea change, moving the center of rap and R&B to his Atlanta hometown and putting his own adrenaline-charged bellow at the center of everything. Crunk was one of the rawest, most visceral subgenres of rap music, and it seemed light years removed from the rap mainstream, let alone the actual pop charts. Lil Jon had turned himself into the human face of crunk, a genre of burly gang-chant fight music that first developed in underground Memphis clubs in the ’90s. In the first few years of the new millennium, Lil Jon put the dancefloor in an unbreakable chokehold. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.įor a few years there, you weren’t really partying unless a man with dreadlocks and sunglasses and platinum-plated fangs was screaming at you.

Usher caught up genre