The countdown for Usher‘s highly-anticipated Superbowl Halftime Show performance is just weeks away, and following the release of an edge-of-your-seat trailer, now he’s teasing more of what’s to come.
The R&B King teased in a new interview with Vogue that the 13-minute performance will be a celebration of R&B music, and is being curated to have the genre take center stage. He also revealed that his icons Michael Jackson, and Prince are a major part of his influence on the performance.
Get into a snippet from the article below.
“It has to be perfect,” Usher says. Thirteen minutes is not a very long time for someone who likes to dazzle with interactive experiences and elaborate set design, for someone with several decades of hits and a deep bench of collaborators. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” Usher says. “I want people who have been a part of that journey to feel like it’s a celebration for everybody, for all of us, from the beginning up until this point.”
The specifics are still under wraps, but in mid-January, during a break on the Bel Air set of a glossy new music video for an afrobeat-inflected earworm off Coming Home (20 tracks of absolute bangers, by the way, that will make fans of his oeuvre exceptionally happy), Usher sits down to share a few hints about halftime. Yes, there will be skating, and the killer choreography you might have come to expect; there will be at least one major costume change; and perhaps most pivotally, there will be some important guests. “This night was specifically curated in my mind to have R&B take the main stage,” he says, and he’s pulled together people who represent, for him, the genre’s architects. “Not just R&B music, but R&B performance, R&B connection, R&B spirit.” He’s been thinking about legendary Vegas showmen like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley while diving deep into the details—he’s dedicated to the minutiae of his performances, he says, but he’s been working on “letting go.” It has to be a perfectly orchestrated and (much rehearsed) 13 minutes that also has to be approved by the NFL, but he promises that the audience will feel that they are personally being serenaded. “I’m literally speaking to every woman,” he says, “I want to make it feel like that.” It will be a celebration of everything he’s done and everywhere he’s been, and it will sit comfortably with the iconic performances of Super Bowls past. He’s been thinking a lot lately about Michael Jackson, and Prince, and what R&B represents in a country where it wasn’t so long ago that Black performers like him had to walk through the kitchen in order to be on the stage.
“I’m thinking about the fact that I’ve been able to walk through the front door as a result of their sacrifice and ability. So I’m carrying a little bit of that,” he says. “It’s made me feel joyous. It made me feel like I want to go out there, and I want the world to smile when they look at me. I want them to feel something, and feel my passion, my love, feel like I was the right person to sit in this position, and I was the right person to bring this kind of energy and love and connection to the entire world.” Not just because of the songs, or the hit records, but because of him: that famous onslaught of love shaking Vegas one more time. “People will tune in for a football game, but I hope when they look at that halftime performance, I’m hoping they walk away with something that’s healing them,” he says. “Something that makes them feel hopeful, and not just look at the past, but have hope for the future, and have hope for a different type of future than we’re looking at right now in the present.”
Get into some of the snaps from the interview below and the full article HERE.
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