first round
(2) Usher, “Yeah!”
DIMMED
(15) Tilly & the Wall, “Rainbows in the Dark”
150-41
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/3/24.
Me and Ursh Once More: andrea mele on usher’s “yeah!”
We’ve all been there. At a wedding, perhaps, or in the car, or at a school dance, when it happens. We hear something like a siren, the unmistakable clarion call of synth, alternating G-E-flat—G-D (if you don’t know notes, think low-high, low-slightly-less-high), and an invocation: “Peace up, A-town down,” and then the chant and its echo, “Yeah! yeah, yeah” and repeated, and this is our signal, our invitation. Whatever was happening, we stop, we know. It’s time to make our way to the dance floor, or to freeze frame in the driver’s seat, then begin to bob and bop, nodding our heads and playing our roles—one morphing into the next—a crooner, a suitor, a meta-commenter, a hype man, a strobe light, a laser beam, a dancer. I have played them all, and with gusto. That I could do so within one song, one moment on the dance floor, in my mind, cements “Yeah!” as a song still worth dancing to. “Yeah!” is more than a song that’s meant to be danced to, though; it is meant to be performed and embodied.
My friends, across eras, know my penchant for interpretive dance (and love me anyway), and though it was formed well before “Yeah!” burst onto the scene, it realized its full expression in songs of its ilk and during this time—the era of low-rise jeans and going-out tops and the type of rampant misogyny in the name of early internet celebrity that’s finally being reevaluated and condemned since “Me Too.” We are all getting our due, but we are all also still getting (not quite as) low, and we are, unequivocally, still beholden to “Yeah!”’s siren song.
It’s been twenty years since “Yeah!” was released, an amount of time that has seemed impossible until recently, when I emerged from the suspended animation of my thirties to the realization that the aughts are ripe for a resurgence, not just a reckoning. As an elder millennial, I celebrate this brief, shining moment in time when the whole world seemed to be in its club era. And I have been getting a lot more opportunities to do so lately.
Suddenly, I am attending stadium concerts headlined not just by the biggest solo acts of the 90s and 2000s, but by entire lineups of them. I’m meeting women in line for drinks at The Trilogy Tour and NKOTB’s Mixtape Tour who have taken whole days off from work to soak in and recover from the nostalgic magic of our once and future icons. Sure, now I can say that I’ve seen En Vogue and Salt-N-Pepa and Ricky freaking Martin, but I also have witnessed “legacy” artists like Tom Petty, Prince, Fleetwood Mac, and The Rolling Stones before it was too late. I am still seeing Jenny Lewis and my other early 2000s indie heroines any chance I get, honoring how I’ve grown up alongside them while frequently returning to the well of what they gave me then.
And because I’m not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom (by the way, this famous Mean Girls line is twenty years old this year, too), I am also taking my stepdaughter to the Re:SET Tour in Los Angeles to see supergroup, boygenius, because we are both fans, and yeah, I know all the lyrics. I am telling her in the car about how I saw Radiohead, Jurassic 5, and (somewhat regrettably) Morrissey all in 2003 as she is trying her best (and kind of succeeding) to make me a Swiftie. I have never actually been cool, but I have always appreciated many genres of popular, and sometimes not-so-popular, music. I am the all the markets, it seems, so when Usher announced that he’d perform as the 2024 Super Bowl halftime headliner, my immediate response was not just glee, but pride.
You should know up front, however, that I’m the kind of Usher fan who would go see him if he came to my town—and be singing and dancing along the whole time, emerging from the arena sweaty and euphoric— but I don’t think I’d travel to see him—and didn’t during his My Way Vegas residency, and while I have definitely not gotten sick of “Yeah!” or Usher in general (or of Lil Jon or Ludacris, for that matter) in the research and writing of this essay, even as culture and media are saturated with his presence, I am content to be a radio fan (and yeah, I still listen to the radio, thanks mostly to my old-ass car with a broken USB port). I want to hear “Yeah!” the same way I want to hear Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It.” That is to say, I want to be periodically surprised and delighted to hear it—and to share that experience with whomever happens to hear it with me.
Take That, Rewind it Back
“Its longevity belies its benignancy,” is something a doctor once told my father about a growth on his leg. That phrase finds its way into my consciousness too often, but it seems especially appropriate here. “Yeah!” is ubiquitous. It is ever-present. It is, also perhaps unremarkable to “true fans,” maybe innocuous, and yet, it has staying power. A friend, younger than I, was ten or so when this song came out. They recall it being popular at high school dances, years later, when they were struggling with a religious upbringing and the simultaneous desire to “freak” with other teens on the dance floor. The feeling of missing out on expressing cultural belonging, though dance—even if it’s just grinding—in one’s teen years is hardly benign.
“It makes me think of my childhood,” says my sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, who was three years from being born when the song was released. It’s true that many of us grow up listening to, absorbing, and in some cases adopting the musical tastes of our parents, but in this case, I have only the culture to thank for her nostalgia. “Yeah!” wasn’t a song I put on very often, if ever, while I was getting ready or making dinner or doing the purposeful cultural educating parents are known to do. “Yeah!” is a song, instead, that finds you—in the club or at a wedding, and even, in a car seat as it finds your stepmom at the wheel, cranking up the volume when the beat drops and the hook hooks.
“Yeah!” was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart for twelve consecutive weeks in 2004, only to be displaced by “Burn,” the second single off Usher’s Confessions. The song won a Grammy for “Best Rap/Sung Collaboration” and an MTV Video Music Award for Best Dance Video, among other awards and generally positive critical reception. It was the most played song in 2004—something you might’ve guessed if you, too, could not escape its presence. I’m not suggesting that “Yeah” is as popular now as it was then. It’s not factually or experientially true (though the Super Bowl did cause streams of Usher’s songs to surge exponentially and his new album, Coming Home, released in the same week, debuted at number one in album sales).
“Yeah!” was so popular that it birthed such iconic Chapelle’s Show skits as “A Moment in the Life of Lil Jon,” in which Dave Chapelle impersonates Lil Jon going about daily activities using almost exclusively his catch-phrases, “YEAH,” WHAT,” and OKAYYY.” Regular people started talking in scream-phrase like Lil Jon, too (I would love to say I never tried it out, when, for instance, my college boyfriend asked me to pass the mustard, but I can’t guarantee that’s true).
The song (even post-Superbowl) isn’t popular in the same way it was twenty years ago. But it has infused culture to such an extent since then that maybe we don’t even notice it anymore. It’s Will Smith’s character in Hitch trying to teach Kevin James’s character to dance to it. It’s kicking off the “Wolfpack”’s Vegas adventure in The Hangover, and it’s getting the crowd hype at your local high school’s basketball game. “Yeah!” is there for all our special moments, year after year. Ask any wedding DJ how often “Yeah” is requested or played intentionally at multi-generation celebrations, and you will get one answer: all the time.
It’s true that my go-to wedding request is usually T-Pain and Flo Rida’s “Low,” (and that I won’t stop until it’s played; sorry, Kristen and Jeff!), but that’s because I am certain “Yeah!” is already on the docket. “Yeah!” is a gateway song, one that preceded Lil Jon’s “Get Low” at my cousin Chris’s wedding. I’ve never been more excited to attend a family event than when I got to scream “til the sweat drop down my balls” as I buttered another roll at my table, shoved it in my mouth and proceeded to the dance floor, fueled by carbs and ready to drop it with the youngest of them. Hear me out, though: the case for “Yeah!” being the ultimate 2000s dance song is not just its palatability (I haven’t heard “Get Low” at a wedding since) or longevity, but its infectious energy and the something-for-everyone-ness that only true supergroups can provide.
I know that the collaborative relationship that Lil Jon, Usher, and Ludacris have is not one of a typical supergroup. They’ve never released a full album together (though the cottage industry Lovers and Friends spawned carries significant weight), and though they have joined forces many times over the years for performances, new singles, and business or philanthropy, they don’t have a name, they aren’t touring together, and they don’t identify themselves as such. My labeling the trio a supergroup is aspirational, I know, and still, the song was such a smash that I want more. “Yeah!” is a song by Usher, featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris, and if it always has to be that way, what would a new single look like today, when none of them, save maybe Usher, are experiencing the level of saturation and influence they enjoyed twenty years ago?
Lovers and Friends
In 2004, half my life ago, I was both a sophomore and a junior at UC Berkeley. Perhaps I had quit the campus radio station after my DJ training, having left an “I’m sorry, I can’t. Don’t hate me” note à la Sex and the City in the Operations Manager’s mail slot at KALX 90.7. My hipster ways were at odds with my club ways, or maybe they weren’t mutually exclusive with them, but I couldn’t hold them both in my mind.
I had a Philosophy and Linguistics double-major long-term college boyfriend and a friend group that included a (former) member of the Cal water polo team, who also happened to have earned a perfect score on the SAT and easily learned languages, but who also smoked obscene amounts of weed, and whose dorm room I had once deep-cleaned because I couldn’t bear the thought of his bringing an unsuspecting paramour there to find, under the piles of unwashed clothes and debris, a half-eaten pizza rotting—or worse—not just for her benefit, but for his; a close high school friend with whom I met this crew but mostly lost touch with after college; my then best friend, a former refugee from Serbia who I had tried unsuccessfully to seduce during our first semester, and who would become a hairstylist after graduating with a history major, then eventually move to Hawaii, disappearing from my life in the way college friends often do—the way these ones did; two Belgian National Soccer players on international study, one of whom I made out with on the dance floor of a Miss Kitten concert in “the city” (you had to call it that if you lived in the East Bay, as we did, in the early aughts), which effectively ended my relationship with the Philosophy major, as neither of us could hold in our heads or hearts my tendency toward betrayal—which at the time appeared to me as simply an expression of the embodied and unbridled sprit of dance (and in fact, as something I claimed was permissible because members in our friend group tended toward something like free love, or at least the expression of desire couched in amicable familiarity); two women who I never got close to, but pretended to; the first person I ever slept with and whom I would return to for another bout as friends upon breaking up with the Philosophy major; and me. There were, of course, others on the periphery, including my college roommate, who I was not a good friend to then, but who has become one of the closest people in my life today.
Many of us worked together “in pizza,” as I like to tell my husband and others, as if it’s a badge of honor or coolness—perhaps even more so than working at a radio station, at the now-shuttered independent pizza shop on University Avenue that became, for a time, “an official sponsor of Cal Athletics,” which for me, meant wedging high-capacity hot travel bags filled with pizza and their famous “cheesy sticks” into my purple, three-door Saturn and delivering them to buildings on campus, or setting up a tent and handing out slices during the pre-game tailgate on the field at Memorial Stadium, and which also meant that after everyone quit the shop, I stuck around and became a sort of manager, as I often do, when the only thing I know to do is work hard to escape the messy business of forming an identity independent of work. Eventually, as this group disbanded, many moving to the city, or to grad school, or back home, I became friends with the actual managers of the shop, worked in another, nicer, restaurant, and got busy with making such a mess of my early twenties that I, too, moved back home to Fresno, ostensibly to start graduate school, but also to lick my wounds, though not expertly enough to prevent me from continuing to make a mess of my life for a while.
We all grew up. We all got less messy. We stopped being friends. But I know, because social media was invented during this time, and some of them are still in my “network,” that they all made good. One became a critically acclaimed journalist and author of politically analytical books, which I still haven’t read (but have gifted!), and might not understand if I did; another worked for the Federal Reserve for a while and now, based on my internet stalking, is also an economics professor and well-published scholar, maybe still a surfer. They work in public health and have kids I’ve never met and don’t know the names of; some, I just assume, also figured it out after the tornado of the Great Recession and our hide-outs in graduate school dropped us off in a new era that didn’t have the same capacity for bangers or millennial ennui.
2004-2007 were all the same year, and they were all accompanied by “Yeah!” The Bay Bridge was always under construction, so the BART was regularly free, and when it wasn’t, we’d pile into my Saturn or another friend’s car and sit in the bridge traffic, on the way getting hyphy and blasting E-40 and Mac Dre, and on the way home getting sleepy and playing electronica or whatever was on KALX or Energy 92.7.
We had house parties—one in celebration of my twentieth birthday in 2003, where this essay’s likely rival, “Hey Ya,” was played on repeat, and another during which my dancing antics, in an adorable pleated black satin skirt, led to my slipping on the hardwood floor, puddled with Pabst Blue Ribbon, and keeping said skirt, smelling of booze, in my closet, until I could afford, mentally and financially, the indignity of taking it to the dry cleaner’s.
These house parties succeeded and were concurrent with our attending other parties—some at the Co-Ops adjacent to the UC Berkeley campus, some at frat houses if it really came to that, some at friends of friends’ apartments—where we danced to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” and Peaches’s “Fuck the Pain Away” with equal excitement. These parties were supplemented by our leaving it on the dance floor at the White Horse Inn or Radio Room or a concert or an artist warehouse in Oakland or our favorite dive, The Hotsy Totsy.
These Are My Confessions
In my 2003 journal, I wrote, and I kid you not: “Angela Chase said, 'High School is a battlefield…for the heart.’ Maybe, but college is a battlefield for the ego.”
I have left myself a complete record of those days—when it comes to feelings, at least. When I was nineteen, in 2003, I wrote, “I’m only nineteen, but life has patterns,” and now at forty, I can say that I was not wrong when it came to mine. I was a millennial grasping at the dream my Boomer parents wanted for me—every day writing in my journal about how I just wanted to be happy, but couldn’t manage that feeling unless I was overcommitted, overworked, and usually, overcompensating for the talent I didn’t believe I’d ever have. I was quitting the radio station, quitting computer science, quitting relationships and quitting feelings, often. I was not, really, like Luda, Lil Jon, and Usher, making good on any potential I’d displayed as a child.
I was neither lady nor freak in any setting, but was instead flailing about the way young, privileged people can do when they set out into the world, leaving the comforts of tiny stages and big dreams for a mounting pile of evidence that they are ordinary, fallible, and typically crushed by unreasonable expectations.
When I say that 2004-2007 (OK, 2003-2008) were the same year, I mean it culturally and personally. I mean both that I am always the same, though sometimes with the benefit of perspective and empathy for my younger self, and that those years in my life and in anyone’s—the early 20’s and the early 2000’s—are indeed a battlefield for both the heart and the ego. And it was a battle I took to, and abandoned on, the dance floor.
Work That Out For Me
The joke goes something like this: why does every music video from the early 2000s look like it was filmed inside a cheese grater? “Yeah!” deviates slightly from this prescription, but features other hallmarks of the maximalist style prominent in the TRL era. There are copious blue, then green laser beams, a club setting, choreographed group dances, bejeweled status jewelry, cameos, and even an instructional dance outro, where everyone does the A Town Stomp, the Muscle, the Thunderclap, and finally the Rockaway. Canadian director, Mr. X, who also directed videos for Usher’s U Got it Bad, U Don’t Have to Call, and Caught Up, as well as a slate of other high profile music videos, shot it. Influence and inspiration, according to Mr. X, came from Michael Jackson’s Rock With You video and Usher’s own desire to showcase his dance moves.
The premise of “Yeah!” is that our narrator, Usher, is up in the club with friends, by his own admission, trying to find someone with which to hook up surreptitiously, to “get a little V.I.” (a term I’ve never encountered before or since this song), and indeed, we who tend toward betrayal (and let’s be honest, this is all of us), do “know how it feels.” He sees a “shorty” looking and talking at him as if she knew him and thus “decided to chill.” Indeed, we “know how it is.” She’s hot, he’s attracted. She has him “feeling like she’s ready to blow,” (whatever that can mean and which Lil Jon can amplify), and the only thing that can break and release the tension is a trip to the dance floor.
Our temptress beckons, “Come and get me,” so Usher gets up and “follow[s] her to the floor,” as she says, “Baby, let’s go,” and the dance ensues. Usher is so “caught up” in it that he forgets she told him that she used to best friends with his current girl, and thus, the dilemma also arises. By the second verse, the dancer has our narrator so entranced, “she’s all up in [his] head now,” that he doesn’t know what to do. If he follows this path, Usher doesn’t know where it will lead, but he does know that her dancing is so skillful that she has ascended to being “alright with [him],” as she’s off the charts, “a certified twenty,” who can get low with the best of them. When, at the end of the verse, “she asks for one more dance,” Usher is powerless, maybe he’s not even thinking about taking her home anymore. Instead, he wonders, “how the hell am I supposed to leave?”
And this, for me, is what the song is actually about. Not the potential infidelity or the promise of sex or things our shorty has whispered in his ear. Instead, it is about just how impossible it is to leave the dance floor when it is the best of all possible worlds. The power of dance compels Usher, gets him even more caught up, but in ways that seem more pure to me than anything that proceeds from the dancing. This is the way I danced in 2004 and its concentric years. I would do anything to get someone, anyone, out there dancing with me, feeling and embodying the song at hand. And so I wonder whether, in fact, our shorty doesn’t actually care about “just where it’s gonna lead,” whether or not she used to be “the best of homies” with her target’s current girl; maybe she just cares about getting the best fucking dancer out there with her to get low.
In fact, in the video, the first dancer is replaced by another halfway through, after the narrative dilemma is established. Both dancers are skilled, seductive, and high energy. That the video suggests they are interchangeable narratively does not diminish their effect. The first gets a bit more of the close ups, executes a Marilyn Monroe blown dress moment that successfully gets Usher to the dance floor, where she does a move that also resembles a strobe light, drops very low and bounces right back up, and then ultimately grasps onto Usher from behind, in a sort of piggy-back move, clasping her hands in front of his chest and wrapping a leg around him so that they move as one while nodding “yeah” in time with the chorus.
When the second main seductress takes the floor, the energy continues. The laser beams are beaming, and many of the club’s patrons are dancing alongside her in lock step. There are slinky shirts billowing, fur-lined boots stomping, and Usher doing the most to prove he’s the undisputed king of dance. There are some interesting Thriller-esque moves, some puppetry-like then flapping-bird ones, and a lot of synchronized choreography—first the men, then the women, dancing through Ludacris’s verse. We never actually see Usher leave the club with either dancer, but we are not really wondering about that. We’re too busy watching the footwork, noticing the cameos (Chingy, Fonsworth Bentley), getting splashed with Lil Jon’s champagne and marveling at the coordinated camo outfits of our supergroup, to care whether the dance is consummated. The video ends with Usher, Lil Jon, Ludacris, and all the club-goers joining together for some light-hearted group moves led by Lil Jon—moves you can’t do unless you’re in the know.
The Flow to Make Your Booty go—
A mere three years before Yeah was released, I was in an AP Composition classroom with my best friends, teaching my peers about literary and rhetorical devices in some essay we had been assigned, to the tune of “What’s Your Fantasy” by Ludacris. We rhymed:
There are some e-e-ellipses in the introduction, and they are there because you pause and it adds to the diction. Make sure you pause-pause when you see a semicolon; the author n-n-n-knows it makes a smooth transition.
Such performances were not uncommon in my youth. Those years saw my friends and I creating short films of our favorite scenes in, say, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, dressing up whichever grade-grubbing dude, say, humbled himself to wearing a fur-lined duster—and not much else—to embody William Carlos Williams as we circled around him chanting, “Walt. Whitman. Walt. Whitman” (usher usher), and doing an ill-advised guillotine dance, “The Carmagnole” (do the A Town Stomp) to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” to say something about A Tale of Two Cities. Indeed, we were the theatre kids, and I like to think that the strange interpretations we created and performed brought levity and interest to our teachers’ and peers’ high school experiences. They certainly did to mine.
That I can remember and perform on command both our revision of “What’s Your Fantasy? And Luda’s verse in “Yeah!” are a testament to his writing, not mine. I’d put Ludacris’s lyrical dexterity and bawdy playfulness up against Chaucer’s, which you, if you were the kind of Literature major I was, know is high praise.
Christopher Bridges is also, of course, an actor. And a pretty solid one. Today, Ludacris also happens to be a producer on my high school best friend and former skit partner’s Broadway show, How to Dance in Ohio, for which she wrote the book and lyrics. Life is wild.
The flow, though:
Luda makes an entrance, announces his outfit, claims his space, rhymes “ridiculous” with “conspicuous,” and it’s on. What comes shortly after is an image and turn of phrase of the highest, perhaps grossest, caliber—and one that I’ve heard come out of the sweetest mouths: “If you hold the head steady, I’ma milk the cow.” I’ll admit that when dancing to this song, I don’t quite know how to embody this part of the narrative. But the joy of Luda’s flow is that you don’t have time to. No, instead you’re holding court, moving onto reestablishing your royal stature (Off with their clothes!), threatening “foot patrol” to those who aren’t “cutting,” and offering drinks and “filling cups” because you’re a good host who knows that your guest is “the one to please.” The verse comes back around, pulls Usher back into the mix, and ends with the battle cry and impossible dream of every repressed millennial: “We want a lady in the street, but a freak in the bed!”
The Beat to Make Your Booty Go—
The members of “Yeah”’s supergroup grew up too. In truth, Lil Jon was already grown when “Yeah!” came out. At 53, he’s not truly my contemporary, having already been in the industry for many years before he produced “Yeah!” at 32. He created the beat and had the foresight to know it was going to eternally slap. He’d made a previous version for Mystikal, which then moved to Petey Pablo, eventually becoming the track, “Freek-a-Leek,” and convinced Usher that, retooled and with a new synthy hook (and then leaking it to DJs to ignite its ascendance) the song should be the first single off Usher’s 2004 album, Confessions.
Lil Jon has recently released a guided meditation album, called Total Meditation, in the wake of his divorce and newfound health-consciousness. He’s also the star of HGTV’s Lil Jon Wants to Do What, a home renovation show that has him taking tequila shots with Atlanta suburbanites as he dreams up ways to turn their basements, etc. into usable entertainment-cum-storage spaces. In the pilot, one homeowner conveys her anxiety about his plans to take down a wall with a quippy and cringey, “torn down for what?” While my first instinct is to want more for Lil Jon—the “King of Crunk”—who is responsible for much of the 2000s Billboard Top whatevers, I also recognize his ability to play the long game. Maybe the era of Crunk is over and maybe he’s figured out how to stay relevant and solvent, but, as much as I appreciate and identify with this turn toward diminished relevance and continued profit, I wish that he could pull an Usher, could remind the world of his thirty-plus year record of skin in the game, could reassure us it’s not over for him, either.
The Voice to Make Your Booty Go—
It is tempting to think about Usher’s somewhat sanitized appearances on Carpool Karaoke, Sesame Street, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert (which was, as the kids say, fire) and The Voice as evidence of his own continued benignity and diminishing relevance. But upon closer inspection and taken with his sold-out eighteen-month Vegas residency, as well as his irreproachable Super Bowl Halftime Show performance this year, a new narrative arises—one that Usher has been meticulously crafting for nearly thirty years. If “Yeah!” is the song that Usher is most known for, these performances reminded us that, watch this, in fact, the canon is deeper and wider than many had realized and certainly hadn’t given him credit for, even as he offers a Masterclass™️ in Performance.
The facts are out there. From Atlanta church choirs and a winning performance on Star Search as a pre-teen, to attending “Flavor Camp” while living with the recently-disgraced Diddy (which Usher still hasn’t commented on…but this isn’t an essay about Surviving Diddy), to early hits like “My Way” and “Nice & Slow,” through what we once thought was the apex of his career—the 8701 and Confessions eras—and even during a relatively quiet if EDM-heavy 2010s, Usher has been there all along, dropping hits and practicing his craft, maintaining a simultaneously charming and just-naughty-enough persona. It’s only been in recent years that he’s been crowned (sometimes reluctantly) the King of R&B. Usher graciously credits his inspirations and influences—Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Prince— but craves something beyond an inherited kingdom. He’s not sure what that is yet, but Usher is acutely aware of building something. Usher’s recent Super Bowl performance was a well-timed reminder that Usher isn’t done, even as he reflects on where he’s been.
I had to pick up my husband from the airport at the exact same time Usher was set to take the stage at Super Bowl LVIII, and I was kind of mad about it. I had also declined invitations from friends to watch the game because I wanted to be ready, focused, and uninterrupted when he came on. Typically, the Halftime Show is the only part of the Super Bowl I care about, and while this year had other attractions in the form of Taylor Swift’s NFL takeover, I was there for Usher in ways that I haven’t been for past performers, and I like to think I would have been, even if I wasn’t neck-deep in this essay. In retrospect, I am grateful for the opportunity to watch it on my own, after the fact, after ignoring all the exuberant texts that came in while I was dutifully waiting in the cellphone pick-up area at the Fresno Yosemite International Airport. When I settled in and pressed play, that pride swelled up again, as I watched the King of R&B prove why he was there—even if such proving should have been unnecessary.
I must admit that I was equal parts anxious and excited to watch the Halftime Show. My husband can attest that I was standing, singing, and dancing the entire time, that I was ready for anything, but pleased at the progression, the styling, the guests. Though Usher’s Dolce & Gabbana cloak and throne from which he emerged to perform “Caught Up,” were perhaps a bit on the nose, I wouldn’t say they were over the top. Usher stripped down and roller skated into the nation’s hearts that night, and the joy and precision of the set were undeniable. He managed to incorporate a dozen of his hits into thirteen minutes, while dancing (really well) on grass and executing several costume changes. The economy and thoughtfulness of the performance crystalized for me in the one line he performed from “Superstar,” though: “Spotlight, Big Stage/50,000 fans screaming in a rage,” demanded that everyone in attendance and viewership recognize that this was Usher’s moment, that he had made it, as he told his mama during the performance and as the joy on his face throughout confirmed.
I enjoyed the Halftime Show performance thoroughly, was screaming at my husband the whole time, a litany of “I told you so”’s about Usher’s singing and dancing prowess, about his untouchable and underrated catalog of hits on display. But I was also freaking out about how the media would respond. Yes, there were some mic problems; yes, Alicia Keys missed her first note; yes, there was a lot going on with the Cirque du Soleil type dancers and maybe a slow-down during the “ballads,” but when Jermaine Dupri, in his Louis Vuitton bobby socks got out there, you knew the show was bound to turn up.
And turn up it did. The show didn’t unravel, but loosened up, in the best ways, as it progressed. I don’t much care for the Black Eyed Peas or even the song, “OMG,” but it served as a purposeful transition. If you have Usher roller skating under the widespread legs of Will.i.am on national television, what else is left to prove? And then Lil Jon enters, surrounded by a throbbing mosh pit, for a little of “Turn Down for What” before “Yeah!” begins and gives the crowd what they’ve been waiting for. Though the song was condensed, it hit all the high marks, even allowing for Luda’s cow-milking reference. My hot take is that Usher, sweaty and glorious, looked and sounded like a star in his prime throughout, and that during “Yeah!,” Luda and Lil Jon were the best featured guests they could be.
Luckily, I’ve seen that, in the week since the game, the media has agreed, praising the buoyancy and skill of the performance, and commenting that the show cemented Usher’s legacy. Though our supergroup looked sort of like Ninja Turtles while doing it, the energy they brought to the stage was beyond nostalgia. It was a hyper-drive testament to the impact, not just of “Yeah!,” but of Usher. I, for one, can’t wait for the documentary “making of” the halftime show.
Even if no album or tour followed—if there was no swell of media attention wondering why Usher’s protégé, Justin Bieber, didn’t perform, or analyzing the star’s past relationships in the wake of his wedding immediately following the Super Bowl—Usher can be proud, not just of his Half Time show success, but of his multi-decade track record of hits, the pinnacle of which was “Yeah!” He could never give us anything else, and we’d still have enough.
And maybe it’s actually a lot. Maybe all we can ask for is that the icons of our youth show up, occasionally, on our radio dial or in our wellness apps or at a family celebration—maybe even at stadium tour in our hometown— and always, if we’re lucky, on the Jumbotron of our hearts.
Andrea Mele is a writer and arts administrator living in Fresno, California. Her essays have been published in The Rumpus, The South Loop Review, and elsewhere. She is the current Director of LitHop Fresno, and is always down for a dance party.
She Fell in Love with the Drummer: allie leach on “Rainbows in the Dark” by Tilly and the Wall
In the music video to Tilly and the Wall’s “Rainbows in the Dark,” we first see a pair of black, high-heeled tap shoes, the kind that I always wanted to wear as a kid because they gave off a I’m-a-woman-now vibe. We see bright flashing lights: white, pink, yellow, orange, green, and blue. Everything’s kind of blurred at first, like rain on a windshield. Then the image comes into focus. We get a flash of Jamie Pressnall, the band’s tap dancer, who flicks her black hair away from her face, waiting for her moment to begin. An unseen band member blows into a harmonica twice, warming us up, building the suspense for what’s to come. Then the five band members shout in unison, “1, 2, 3, 4!” And the tapping begins.
Before we dive any further, what you really need to know is this: this band has a tap dancer as their drummer. From the get go, you know there’s gonna be some dancing. While “Rainbows in the Dark” isn’t what I call booty shaking music, it’s another type of dance song. It’s a cardio party-o of a performance. It’s a piñata bursting with candy. In a word: joy.
Jamie Pressnall—in a black tank top, a blue tutu layered over a red tutu, and gray and white polka dot leggings—performs on a stage but uses only a piece of circular metal for her tapping. She flicks and steps and stomps and rolls her toes and heels with perfectionist precision. The metallic goodness of her loud, clear sounds shocks me like an electric eel, making me glow all over, filling me with a tingly energy.
We get quick cuts to all of the band members. First, there’s Derek Pressnall on guitar, wearing a yellow and black striped tank top and shaggy side bangs covering one of his eyes, making him look like a hipster Charlie Brown. Then there’s Nick White on keyboard. Standing arched over on the keyboard and wearing a shirt the color of a firecracker popsicle, he’s giving off some Schroeder vibes. Then there are the other two female band members, but they don’t look like Peanuts characters. They are sexy. Kiana Alarid, the bass guitarist, gives a sultry stare with her dewy face, pink blush, lip gloss, septum piercing, and bleached blonde bob. Neely Jenkins, the lead singer, taps her hands on a tambourine and has shaggy, long, brown hair and bangs. She’s wearing a thin satiny gold short sleeved blouse with puffy sleeves and ruffles on the front.
The magic of Pressnall’s tapping is contagious, and now all of the other band members are dancing. Derek Pressnall holds his guitar like a toddler, lovingly bouncing it around while keeping it safe. White looks like a toddler himself, bopping around on his keyboard. Alarid is an ethereal pop fairy princess, deeply conveying the meaning of the lyrics, occasionally with her eyes closed. Jenkins looks so cool as she sways her shoulders and hips, as she shakes and hits her tambourine.
This song could be mistaken as a twee indie pop song, but when I dive into the lyrics, I realize that it’s more complex than meets the ear. My interpretation is that this song’s about a young, outcast kid from a middle class family. The kids around him are rich and picking fights with him. His sister kisses a “maple skinned boy” and there’s all this drama about it in their town: “such ridiculous hate in this hot summer sweat.” The only thing that brings him solace is listening to music: “I laid on my back, let the punk record spin. The stomping guitar, it was shooting out stars. It all went to my heart. Yeah, some rainbows in the dark.” The song’s so easily relatable and brings me back to so many times in my life when I’ve turned to music and dance to give me all the feels.
The year is 2006. I’m twenty two years old and at home from college for the summer. I sneak Riesling wine from my parents’ basement fridge, put it in a water bottle, and then drive forty minutes downtown to Joe’s Cafe. This place is so St. Louis: It's a BYOB bar and they only serve popcorn. There’s a two buck cover charge to come in and listen to live music. And here’s a secret: I have tap shoes in my big green purse.
“Rainbows in the Dark” reminds me of being at Joe’s Cafe and spontaneously tap dancing with a live band of talented oldsters. I’m filled with that same kind of euphoric energy that I see in the faces and outfits of the Tilly band members. They–like me–are silly, smiling, and sweating, jumping up and down, tapping our little hearts out, performing to make others happy, to make ourselves happy, and for the brief shower of attention that singing and dancing bring.
I was first introduced to Tilly and the Wall back in 2009, and I’ll admit that it’s been awhile since I paid much attention to them. They were together from about 2006-2013, though in an interview from 2018, Jamie Pressnall said they were all going to come out with an album. To my knowledge, it was a greatest hits CD. Most of the band members have since moved away from Omaha, Nebraska, where they originally formed, and now are scattered throughout the United States though Pressnall still lives in Omaha with her family. She’s married to her former bandmate, Derek Pressnall, and she’s currently the director of a preschool, coincidentally named “Rainbow Factory Preschool.” It’s hard not to make connections to the song and the influences from Tilly.
An interesting connection here to my own life is that I’m a teacher, but in my wildest dreams I’ve wanted to be a professional tap dancer. From Presnall’s perspective, she achieved some fame: she toured nationally and internationally with Tilly, and they were featured both on The David Letterman Show and Sesame Street. Now, she’s in education. This flipped-flopped comparison makes me think about the paths we’ve taken, and the risks taken and untaken and yet to be taken in both our lives.
I've been tap dancing since I was three. I’ve been through fifteen dance recitals, handfuls of competitions, and have donned lots of lycra, spandex, fringe, glitter, and sparkles. I’ve learned how to sleep with spongy and twisty curlers in my hair the night before performances. I’ve worn so much makeup on stage that my face looked like icing on a child's birthday cake.
Tap was also a way of becoming more confident. While I felt comfortable performing in groups, I never felt comfortable performing solo. Once I did a solo version of “Great Balls of Fire” for Henry Elementary’s Talent show, and my mom told me that I looked down at the ground the whole time. She decided I needed a confidence boost, so she enrolled me in a dance competition class where I’d do a solo tap routine. My teacher Ms. Karen came up with choreography to Bette Midler’s cover of “In the Mood.” It was such an exhilarating and transporting experience: I came off as confident on stage. Even if I was still shy from time to time, when I was on stage, I shined like Christmas lights.
The early 2000s, namely 2004-2009, was a memorable era for me. I’d find any and every excuse to tap dance. During college, tap was kind of my way of introducing myself to people, getting attention, and even free food. One time, I wanted a hot dog at a bar in St. Louis, but I didn't have any money, so I asked them if I could tap dance on stage for a hot dog. And it worked. I did all this because I loved tap dancing, but also because I wanted people to compliment me, to be wowed by me, and to be seen as unique, similar to how Tilly and the Wall is unique for their tap dancer percussionist.
I still tap dance. I take classes occasionally on Monday nights. I taught my friend Katelyn a dance routine that my sister did in 5th grade for a dance competition. I memorized it from watching her in rehearsals every Saturday. After about the 20th time watching the routine, it got stuck in my muscle memory. Katelyn and I performed this dance at her Friendsgiving party this year. She even bought us each a black flapper costume and headpiece with red feather, giving off that flirty vibe that I often associate with dance competition costumes. It was to the tune of Fats Waller’s “This Joint is Jumpin’”, which was featured in the often forgotten but excellent 1978 musical “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” There we were: dancing in front of our friends, now as women approaching 40. Still our girly selves. Still having fun. While we were rehearsing, I told her, “I picked this dance because it’s easy to learn. Also, it’s about having a party.”
She replied, “This song makes me so happy. Tap makes me so happy.” It’s a simple sentiment that I share. Tap is a crowd pleaser. Even if you’re not perfect, as long as you’re having fun, people are impressed.
Not only do I have a connection to Tilly and the Wall because of tap dancing, but also because, like them, I’m from the Midwest, from a suburb called Ballwin, 40 minutes west of St. Louis. In the music video to “Rainbows in the Dark,” the band members look like they’re performing in a garage or a basement, covered with green and silver tinsel, and decorated with colorful light bulbs, conjuring a rainbow. There’s something about this ethos that resonates with me. Growing up in the Midwest, far away from mountains and beaches and forests, I spent a lot of time in my basement with my sisters, cousins, and friends. Basements were where we put on our dance recital costumes and rehearsed, where we put on dress up clothes and found DIY props to make up skits and sing karaoke, where we re-created SNL routines or made up our own weird ass ones. We took these performances seriously, often planning and rehearsing for two hours, with a culminating, 30-minute medley of skits that we performed for our parents and their friends. They, meanwhile, were drinking Budweiser beers and pre-mixed margaritas upstairs at the kitchen table, maybe playing the card game Sequence, maybe just chatting about their lives, maybe just getting a break from us kids, until we’d usher them downstairs. My dad would set up the bulky video camera on its stand and say: Action. There’s something in watching this music video that reminds me of the Midwestern imagination: we don’t have much landscape, so we make our own.
I’m still trying to put my finger on what makes for the Midwestern basement sound. There are genres like Midwest Emo and Indie or Twee bands from the early 2000s era. In addition to Tilly and Wall, the band Bright Eyes, featuring Conor Oberst, is also originally from Omaha. Two of the Tilly band members–Jamie Pressnall and Neely Jenkins–were in a band with Oberst called Park Ave., which disbanded in 2001 and then Tilly formed soon afterwards. Jamie brought along Kianna Alarid from another band that broke up called Magic Kiss. Derek Pressnall and Nick White, natives of Dunwoody, Georgia, were drawn to the music scene in Omaha, Nebraska and moved. Nick White was also one of the few constants for Bright Eyes in 2005, appearing on the albums I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, as well as touring worldwide with the band.
Another favorite band of mine from this time period–probably because I went to college in Indianapolis, where they’re from–are Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s. Their songs are a similar mix of young adult melancholy mixed with childhood playtime. Deep down these self-consciously cool twenty-somethings who get “drunk on cheap red wine in a paper cup” are vulnerable kids playing with cymbals and tambourines.
One of my favorite bands, Belle and Sebastian, are not from the Midwest but from Glasgow, Scotland. That said, I feel like Glasgow could be a gray and rainy big city in the Midwest, since it’s along a river, like St. Louis. All of these bands fused emo and twee and indie pop together: an emphasis on poetic, memorable lyrics. A mix of joy and melancholy. What is it about this music? It makes me bop and sway. It makes me feel like I’m in my 20s and having fun and falling in love and getting sad and drinking too much Carlo Rossi from a coffee mug until I become a shooting star and black out and wake up in my bed and wonder why the butt of my pajama pants are covered in dirt. A mix of highs and lows.
Tilly and the Wall made a big enough name for themselves that they were featured singing the ABCs on Sesame Street back in 2009. Sesame Street tracks with this band, as they have a childlike charm to them. Someone could easily criticize this band for being too twee, but I’d argue that their Midwesterness gives them an earnestness that I feel is genuine. During their prime, they were young 20-somethings who found joy in performing and who gave full-assed performances, not holding anything back. I can imagine that they rehearsed a lot in basements, perfecting everything, because what else is there to do in the Midwest? They were hungry. I see myself in them. These are bored big kids from the land of highways and strip malls, from unswimmable rivers and overcast winter skies, who are desperate for some song and dance in their lives, so they make it up for themselves in their basements: with a few instruments, a tutu, and tap shoes.
Allie Leach’s got tap shoes in her bag, swag. Her writing has appeared in Tucson Weekly, DIAGRAM, Hot Metal Bridge, and the South Loop Review. She teaches and lives in Tucson.