by A few minutes into Usher’s dynamic, slick Super Bowl LVIII halftime show Sunday night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas came a rare, almost surprising moment of calm.
Alicia Keys had just appeared, in a red sequin jumpsuit and matching studded dress, and rather gratuitously botched the opening note of her hit piano ballad “If I Ain’t Got You.”
He recovered, and as he neared the end of the chorus, Usher could be heard singing in quiet harmony as the camera pulled back, settling on the two of them at opposite ends of Keys’ piano. Usher took up the last line of the chorus, alone, soft and confident, almost whispered, before Keys returned to share the last note.
Allegiant Stadium seats approximately 65,000 people, but at the time there were only two. It was one of the quietest sequences in halftime history, a remarkable testament to the gifts of Usher, a performer of precise detail best enjoyed with rapt attention.
Most of the rest of the performance, which spanned more than a dozen songs, was on a larger scale, designed to fill a football field: a small-bore showcase and granular gestures gave way to an explosive party. But what this series did so well was make clear that Usher’s commitment to minutiae and his capacity for greatness are cooked in the same cauldron. He can control the stage when he is packed to the brim and he can do it alone.
Thirty years into his career, Usher, 45, is a showman with his voice, no doubt, but also, and perhaps more, with his body and his feet. From the beginning, the broadcast was careful not to waste any of his movements, the camera resting on him as he performed careful routines of footwork and body flexes. The fact that he was doing a lot of these moves on grass, especially in the first segment (“Caught Up,” “U Don’t Have to Call”) was especially impressive.
He began with dance-centric hits with indelible opening lines, took a brief spoken interlude to acknowledge God and his mother, then offered a bit of the ballad “Superstar” before being joined, loudly, by a marching band. in “Love in This Club.” .” Keys’ next piece ended with the two vocalists singing “My Boo” while strolling tenderly.
Then the transition to party mode began. Atlanta producer Jermaine Dupri did some warm-up work for the crowd before Usher sang “Confessions Part II,” one of the most upbeat songs about sexual infidelity in pop history. After a brief detour through “Nice & Slow” (with a brief acknowledgment of The song’s recent afterlife as a meme.) and the daringly urgent “Burn,” led to “U Got It Bad,” in which she did an extended dance routine with a nice mic stand.
Up until that point, Usher had been in a constant procession of deshabillé: a white fur coat giving way to a cropped white jacket giving way to a heavily sequined tank top. Here, she completed the journey, stripping down to a tank top and then down to just above the waist, except for her signature U-shaped diamond pendant. (To be fair, the amusing pre-show warning said that the action may cause “possible relationship problems”).
This was the highlight of the show: their loudest singing with their most detailed dancing. It was Usher on a small stage, not unlike the one he spent much of last year doing a residency at the Park MGM Hotel and Casino just 10 minutes up the road, putting on an incredibly grandiose set.
From that moment on everything was loose, unburdened fun. SHE played some powerful guitar and transitioned into the silky funk of “Bad Girl.” Soon, the stage was filled with dancers on roller skates, a display of Atlanta’s black skating rink culture. Usher himself, now dressed in a shiny black and blue motorcycle suit, was also on roller skates, and he was agile to boot.
A party had started in Atlanta. She did a small part on “OMG,” a collaboration with Will.i.am that primarily served to underscore the common threads between pop-EDM and the Atlanta crunk music that preceded it by nearly a decade. Lil Jon came in to shout motivation and then moved on to “Yes!” That 2004 collaboration took some of hip-hop’s jaggedest textures and turned them into inescapable pop. Ludacris was there too, managing to sneak some of his filthiest lyrics onto the most sanitized stage.
This finale was a halftime show bonanza: a hit from 20 years ago that still sounds like it’s the future, a heartbreaking party of hundreds of people, a link between black college marching bands and hip-hop and the R&B which they often perform. in the countryside. Everyone on stage did the A-town stomp, the muscle, the thunder, the rockaway. “I took the world to the A,” Usher sang, reminding everyone that in his hands, the global and the local are the same.
