If you ever listen to the radio or watch MTV even once a week, there's no way you can avoid that new Usher song, "Yeah!" It's that song that makes you feel like you're all "bling bling" in some club. It's inescapable. So I figured that it's better to accept it than to fight it and I gave Usher's new CD, "Confessions" a listen.
"Repetitive" is a word that describes the CD well. He's not really doing anything new. The album is surprisingly sexually oriented though. That's the only new thing from Usher - a singer who usually seems innocent and young. He tried this a bit on his last CD. The question is, do you remember that CD? I thought not.
However, true to the name of the album, Usher sure does confess a whole lot. From cheating to producing illegitimate children, he lets the listeners know a whole lot more than they probably want to.
The highlight of the album is probably the unavoidable "Yeah!" The beat is extremely catchy and dance-inducing. Ludacris and Lil' Jon's parts help make the song stick in your head. However, it sounds like every other hip-hop song that has come out recently. This is only magnified by the use of a big name rapper such as Ludacris. However, despite the song's affinity to sound like any typical hip-hop song, it's catchy enough to be the highlight of the CD. This in itself is your forewarning to how boring the album actually gets.
In the song "Confessions Part II," Usher manages to "confess" about the girl he had "on the side." Since he was one of three writers of this song, one questions how true the confession is or why we'd want to hear it. Regardless, he then goes on to explain how hard it is to tell his girlfriend that this other girl is pregnant. The beat is slow and quiet and it seems like he talks more than he sings in the song because clearly the story must be told.
In "Superstar II" Usher sings, "I bought my ticket, I was first in line / This is a metaphor to show how I / Adore you baby, I do." Being that a whopping seven people take credit for writing this song, the line is even more extraordinarily weak than it would've been if one person took credit for it.
If this isn't enough for the metaphors, the chorus is "I been your groupie baby, 'cause you are my superstar." This may possibly be one of the worst slow jams ever made - and there are a whole lot of bad slow songs on this CD.
In the song "Bad Girl," which is definitely Usher's attempt at being a badass, he says, "You know that pimpin' aint easy." Well, if you didn't know that previously, the song teaches you a lot.
Usher, who previously sang about how he messed up a relationship by cheating and getting a woman pregnant, now explains to all of us that he wants a bad girl. If nothing else, this song isn't as boring and slow as many of the other songs on the album. Note, this does not mean the song is good.
In the end, "Confessions" teaches the listener many things. Don't cheat and get some girl pregnant. Ludacris is "in the club lookin' so conspicuous." Usher is a fan of metaphors and bad girls. But most of all, we've learned that $20 is way too much for this album.
Key Tracks - "Yeah," "Superstar" and "Bad Girl."
