USHER – "You Make Me Wanna…"

Setting aside Usher absolves himself of any responsibility for contemplating infidelity, this is a very likeable slice of R&B minimalism. Perhaps the opposite of R Kelly, with subtle low-key whispers and creamy-smooth delivery. The video with the Jamiroquai dance moves and the easy charm, the perfect antidote to Oasis’ superlong and super awful psychedelic epic. Definitely worth a 7

I don’t remember hearing it at the time but this sounds like the sound of the future to my ears, rather than the stale nostalgia of Britpop. The production is light and elastic allowing the singer to dance around the beat. I rarely follow lyrics although it does seem to get a bit tied up in the middle which may suit the theme of infidelity. 6 or 7 from me

Not my kind of thing at all. It’s pleasant enough in places, but the beats get tiresome before long, and the fade seems to be an admission of defeat. At best a FIVE.

She’s his best friend. She talks to him and advises him what to do when he and his girl aren’t getting along, which reading between his lines (“Don’t wanna go/Don’t need to stay”) seems to be quite often. But really it is she he wants, she he has always wanted, so much so that he gets gently accusatory towards her: “Now what’s bad/Is you’re the one who hooked us up/Knowing it should’ve been you.” Women again, eh? You never know where you are with them, do you? *sighs crossly at subtext*

Throughout the song there is the undercurrent of very good, but unstated, reasons why it shouldn’t have been there, principally in its bipolar internal dialogue – Usher sings the song very calmly with its conversation-as-chorus mumbled nervously (“You make me wanna leave the one I’m with/Start a new relationship with you/This is what you do”) though the strange laughs, “ooh”s and throat clearing which go on beneath suggest an ambiguous mind at the point of collapse; all tactics inaugurated by Marvin, and although Usher addresses the song in a far lower key than the younger Marvin would have done, “You Make Me Wanna…” is in its seemingly modest way a beginning of time; producer Jermaine Dupri keeps the arrangement brewing with vague ominosity, its cut-up acoustic guitar and semi-broken beats the first mainstream nod to the innovations Timbaland was already introducing with Aaliyah and Missy. Not the first nu-R&B single to chart, but certainly the first to make number one and already a galaxy away from B*bby Br*wn, “You Make Me Wanna…” is already making plans for the following century.

Usher now seems to have quite a line in R & B conversational, confessional and love triangle songs. At the time it was the first that I was aware of, and, it had the killer title line (with ‘leave the one I’m with, start a new relationship’). This could be shallow, but at face value is an awesome statement. 6.

If your best friend tells you this story, you can empathise and take their point, but at the same time it’s easy to pick to pieces if you’re unsympathetic.

This track along with a bunnied No1, ‘Love in This Club’, and his vocal on ‘Climax’ all have a hook which I really struggle to find with most of his other stuff.

Btw this would have be a US number 1 but for ‘Candle’.

I’m not sure whether I heard this at the time or not; not the sort of thing that would make an impression on me then or now but yeah preferable to an out of ideas Oasis.

this sounds like “the future” – i.e. the 21st century – for the first time in Popular history

is a nice way of putting it, except that it’s sixteen years ago and isn’t that a little old to still be sounding like now?

Anyway it’s a good song and a good sound. I always liked Usher even when I didn’t really know him, he seemed such a charismatic and fun guy. He’d be great to hang out with. I was going to mark it down a point because he’s got better to come, but that’s unfair, it merits an (8).

Like a lot of people, I find this more exciting for what it foreshadows than for what it is. Also reminds me that in the coming golden age of r&b, I liked tracks with female vocals a lot more than ones with male ones. But we’ll get to that in due course, I guess, and there were obviously exceptions…

I didn’t remember this at all, but it’s a great record. Not quite his finest hour – that’s a bunny that is some way off – but still pretty awe-inspiring for the artistry and skill with which it’s put together.

As Lonepilgrim and Weej said, it’s the sound of the future: a blast of the 21st century breaking through into the Popular story back in 1998. The Golden Age of R&B was the future then, even if it is fading into the past now.

I think Tom is right about why it still sounds so radical in this context: it’s a breakthrough at the top of the UK chart for state-of-the-art US R&B, which was light years ahead of what British pop was capable of at the time. As the old saying goes, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

It’s a reminder of the staggering reserves of talent in American music, and black music in particular, in the same way that Motown exposed the weakness of British pop in the early 1960s. All Saints are struggling to keep up, but still a long way behind, and the Spice Girls and Oasis just seem quaint. Britain feels like a rather parochial, backward little island when you listen to this.

One conclusion is that pop is just one of those areas where the US has a comparative advantage, like the Germans with cars or the French with cheese. Put, say, ‘Never Ever’ up against ‘You Makes Me Wanna…’, and it’s like matching a Rover 400 against a BMW. I think I am right that this was an issue that was really starting to worry the British record industry at the time, especially after the ‘Be Here Now’ debacle.

(Britain’s comparative advantage, it is sometimes said, is in the “bullshit industries”: banking, law, accountancy, advertising, journalism. British pop careers from Andrew Loog Oldham to Simon Cowell certainly seem to bear that out.)

#14 – Yes, by “the 21st century” here I mean the first decade (we still don’t have a satisfactory name for it, but let’s call it “the 2000s” – anyone calling it “the noughties” deserves a stern tutting) – that Timbaland / Neptunes sound is already history now, but only just about (have a listen to the Timbaland remix of YMMW on Youtube to hear the next decade already seemingly fully formed)

An interesting thing for me here is the contrast between Plucky British Amateurness and Polished American Professionalism – it seems like one or the other is forever being held as a model in UK music, but artists that follows either idea too far end up producing, respectively, sentimental parochial wank and soul-less plastic pastiche, neither of which do well on the other side of the Atlantic. The interesting bits seem to happen somewhere in the middle of this tension, or by sidestepping it somehow.

Not convinced by this idea that this song is a strong example of early/pre-GoldenAge (which I don’t quite buy the idea of either as it devalues much good stuff within the ten years prior) R&B ‘futurism’. It’s conventional for the time and the rhythm only vaguely aligns it with what Timbaland became a figurehead for, only without being as exciting as Aaliyah’s ‘Are You That Somebody?’, SWV’s ‘Can We’, Ginuwine’s ‘Pony’ and numerous other earlier hits. It strikes me that ‘You Make Me Wanna’ outperformed them all specifically by taking fewer risks. 5.

I would say it’s about 2001 when the charts really catch up to this and the US R&B appears by the bucketload, but there’s the occasional track like this to come before then.

Other than the odd bit of brilliance I’ve never been a fan of this sound at all sadly – it’s dull, irritating, slightly pretentious and to me it’s what would later move me away from the charts as a mid-noughties teenager and immerse myself in lots of underground dance music instead – mostly trance – until things finally moved back to a sound I enjoyed in 2009. Can’t really give it a 1 as it’s not doing anything really offensively bad (unlike many to come) but can’t give it anymore than a 2.

Rather than think of what this points towards, I’m just happy with what it is – which I think is rather good. It seems to fit a lot of words and syllables into short spaces, the better to convey the singer spilling his guts (or at least the rush of his thoughts as he is contemplating spilling his guts), whilst never seeming in too much of a rush, which is a trick in and of itself. Also appreciate Usher’s use of the low, almost mumbly, style, as if ashamed of the thoughts and needs to keep it to himself before he just can’t control himself and raises the volume (“all I seem to think about is you”). It’s a really good performance, more than anything else, as far as I am concerned and I would say 6 is a bit stingy. I’ve gone up to 8.

@22 Your mention of ‘Pony’ made me think about Ginuwine: did Usher get the career that he should have had? Hearing ‘Pony’ for the first time, two years before YMMW in 1996, was a revelation. That really did sound like the future: Timbaland clearly exulting in the discovery of what he was capable of, and what he could get away with, with that brilliant / ridiculous vocal sampled bassline. Ginuwine himself combined poise and intensity in a way that I hadn’t heard since Marvin Gaye, and although the follow-up Prince cover was a blatant bid to anoint himself as the natural heir, it didn’t feel at all illegitimate.

He never really became a star, though. Some of the subsequent records were great, but none made number one. When last seen he was back working with Timbaland – after a long period of estrangement – and released a single that peaked outside the US top 100 in 2010. Proof, I guess, that that era of R&B really is over now.

Usher is younger and more marketable, I suppose, and was always more likely to be a pop star. But I still think Ginuwine could have been bigger than he turned out to be.

I think Ginuwine took his natural course musically. Sure, he wasn’t a global megastar, but he’s a multi-platinum selling artist, been behind some classic song(s )(depending on who you ask) and no one can take that way from him. It seems that even without the novelty of Timbaland though he was able to stay afloat as an artist for a long while, but he became one of those R&B stars that floated to the periphery and even further, like Tyrese or Tank, two people he formed the supergroup TGT with most recently. I think this would have been the fate of a lot of people Timbaland was behind foremostly, Aaliyah may have been an exception as it seems they had a closer bond than business but, hey.

I was visiting London when this hit number one (and while “All Around the World” was), showing my wife the city I had loved in 1985-86 and 1991-92. We both felt rather ambivalent about it, coming off the back of a few weeks in Germany (and before that, Sweden, Canada, the US, and New Zealand). The grime and noise of the underground (before some of its millennial facelifts) were pretty dismal after Germany’s U-bahns, and the cost of living in London relative to NZ/Australia – or anywhere else we had visited that trip – left us breathless, especially as the A$ had collapsed at the start of our round-the-world adventure and we were eking out our savings whichever way we could.

Even though we were in the UK when Usher hit the top, we were in a bubble of friends, extended family, and sightseeing, oblivious to whatever was happening in any charts anywhere, so I listened to this the other day with virgin ears, and today for only the second time. It’s a pleasant enough sound, nothing I’d switch off if it came on the radio, but I can’t find a hook that lifts it above the average for me. My ears aren’t particularly attuned to R&B in any case, which promises either enlightening or awkward times ahead. In this early encounter it probably knocks off a point or two. 5.

Maybe part of the reason Thong Song works for me is that it repeats the same verse three times. Mumbled or not, I’ve got it by the end, which I can’t say about Usher’s verses.

Repeated verses are under-used in music generally in my opinion. The only other example I can think of right now is Cast No Shadow by Oasis.

I bloody hate this record. From what I recall, Usher’s *thing* when this was being pushed pre-release was to slowly strip down to his boxers as the song went on and most people my age at the time just described it as “that song where the singer takes his clothes off”.

Christ, I hate this song. Indeed, I don’t like this sort of R&B at all and Usher is not one of the better purveyors of the form, but this is particularly dull and boring and barely even offers a memorable chorus. It can have 3/10, mostly because I know that there are worse Usher bunnies not yet covered.

If this was “the future” and Oasis was “the past”, then I guess, even as a 12 year-old in 1998, I was a dinosaur. And I’m fine with that.