1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for three months and remains even now a dance-floor filler – a timeless banger. Yeah! Quickly follows, a reminder of crunk’s mainstream stronghold in the early 2000s, but not so much that it dates the track but instead injects it with what is now a gentle nostalgia. Were it not for the honesty and authenticity of the songs that make up the rest of Confessions, the 47 second introduction may come across as insincere. Opening with the foreshadowing Intro, we instantly get a view into what kind of album this is going to be: he’s putting it all out there: “ these are my confessions,” over a sparkling production. Indeed, it is held up to-date as Usher’s greatest artistic achievement – catharsis often can be. I like to think of it as making up for lost time because it took me so long to wake up to Confessions. Now, that same copy sits in my collection, the case in dire need of replacing and there is no way that my brother is ever getting it back, despite the fact that I can easily access it on Spotify whenever I wish. When my younger brother brought home his very own copy of Confessions ( not the deluxe, extended version), I believe I scoffed and turned my nose up. Three years later by some miracle, Confessions was released and became one of the fastest selling albums not only of the Napster-era, but since, with 20 million copies sold worldwide. Released at the very beginning of the new millennium (aka, when illegally downloading music was experiencing its first real boom) Usher’s 2001 album 8701 was written and rewritten a number of times in an effort to circumvent music piracy. As musicians suffered through the Napster era, my friends and I were sharing around copies and mixes of our new discoveries and Usher, an artist who I actually had very vivid, fond memories of prior to that, never made an appearance.
Usher won two Grammys and began working on a more self-assured, confident sound. I, having started high school and dropped dance classes, rejected R&B in favour of pop-punk, indie-pop/rock and The Cure almost exclusively while remaining totally ignorant to the fact that music of every genre was suffering due to something we considered harmless and small: piracy. The time between 2001’s 8701 (which featured the singles U-Turn and U Remind Me ) and Confessions was no doubt formative. In 2004, Usher was making the considered transition from teen heartthrob to mature crooner finally honing the potential he’d had all along. Moreover, the influence of the 2004 release can be heard across the genre to this very day. Still, twelve years after it broke records, selling 1.1 million copies in its first first week alone, it remains one of those albums I put on when I have no idea what else to listen to.įor the better part of a decade, it has remained on high rotation, the physical copy so well loved that the case needs to be replaced, the digital versions seemingly permanently in my Top 25 and Recently Played lists, it makes up almost every road-trip and pre-game playlist. Which is something I find interesting considering the fact that for the three years or so following its release, I remained stubbornly opposed to the mere idea of liking it in any capacity.
#Usher confessions part 2 girl in video full#
If there is one album that I will defend to the death as one of the greatest R&B releases of recent memory, it is Usher’s fourth full length offering, Confessions. ©lyr : Gotta do it for the ladies / And I gotta keep it 'hood / Where we at Polow (Ay) / I see your right /. Complete name : /Volumes/Elements/Раздачи на /Музыка/Usher - iTunes Studio/Here I Stand (Deluxe Version)/21 Love In This Club (feat.