second round
(2) Usher, “Yeah!”
ISOLATED
(10) Cascada, “Everytime We Touch”
143-60
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/14/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
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.
THERE WAS ONCE A TIME WHEN YOU BELIEVED THAT EVERYTIME WOULD LAST FOREVER: CAMERON CARR ON CASCADA’S “EVERYTIME WE TOUCH”
WHEN TO USE SPACES IN TWO-WORD DETERMINER EXPRESSIONS
There are many instances in the English language where two words become joined together to create a compound meaning. Some of these combinations are so familiar or distinctive that they abandon the physical space between words and become one thing: a compound word. You may be especially familiar with a group of these words that refer to the quantity or existence of something.
Consider the following examples:
Everyday
Sometime
Anything
Nowhere
These words are all compound determiners. While it might at first seem easy to spot when to make compound words such as these, don’t be fooled. Not all common two-word determiner expressions can become compound words, and not everyone agrees on the rules.
Consider the following example:
“Everytime We Touch”
This example comes from the title of a 2005 song by the German dance trio Cascada. In addition to providing a sticky earworm, the song, via its title, implies two noteworthy perspectives on when and how compound determiners come into being:
Failure to maintain separation between words within a determiner expression conveys a disregard for particularized, definite meaning.
Compounding words can illustrate an expansive belief in continuous, generalized, and indefinite relational possibilities.
It may be helpful to first address the context of this example.
CONTEXT OF CASCADA’S “EVERYTIME WE TOUCH”
Suppose the year is 2005. Suppose you have just entered the sixth grade. Suppose you have just entered the public school system and discovered that the purpose of the mall is to acquire clothes that might be worn by those not required to don a white polo shirt and pair of navy-blue pants (full-length or cut just above the knee) five days a week. Without prior familiarity of this landscape—public school, middle school, pre-teendom—it is difficult to know the specifics of what others expect from you. Because you are new to the mall, or at least newly aware of all that the mall signifies and contains, you cannot distinguish one store from another. They vary in scent and color only.
In a situation such as this, determination is important. You might look around and observe that everyone is wearing clothing with a certain name and logo on it, the knees of all their jeans are torn in the same way, and one perfume of teenage musk reigns above the others. You might notice that this happens not just at the mall, not just at school, but everywhere. Anyone can recognize this: there are dominant clothes, and there are other clothes. Who wears the dominant clothes determines who will fit in, as adults like to say, and dominate within the pre-teenage social system.
As you come to understand the workings of this system, you begin to recognize things as closely linked together: the people who wear the clothes, the clothing brands. Should space remain between these two ideas or should they join as one?
Consider the following examples:
Delia’s
Hot Topic
Limited Too
Abercrombie & Fitch
Each of these stores, and every store in the Dayton Mall circa 2005, has a specific sensibility. But this will not last. Delia’s will go bankrupt. Hot Topic will add clothes in colors other than black. Even Abercrombie & Fitch, the strongest smelling store in all the mall (with perhaps the exception of Auntie Anne’s, but that is not a clothing store) will change: One day, Abercrombie will give its shirtless doormen shirts. Its shopping bags, with their eternally topless models—eternally without shirts on bodies and eternally without heads in frame—will retreat in favor of a plainer sort of icon, a logo: A&F.
The answer is no, these things should not join as one. The connections between brands and clothes and people wearing those clothes are specific but fleeting. Compound determination comes from connections distinct but lasting.
In what other ways might Abercrombie & Fitch form distinct connections?
The scent
The sound
The bag
We have already ruled out the bag, but its presence here notes that sometimes a compound meaning, despite not being commonly accepted as a compound word, is especially hard to shake off. Suppose you once had an Abercrombie & Fitch bag. Suppose that brand held, for you, such high association with dominant positions within a social system that you did not want to get rid of that bag. Suppose the bag remained at your bedside from approximately 2006-2009. That clean-chested hunky man (headlessly) watching you as you went to sleep. That man providing assurance of your purchased place within the social system. Doing this every night from 2006-2009 such that you come to see this figure as a comfort, a protector. Suppose this headless hunk were to sing you a lullaby. That lullaby would be “Everytime We Touch,” the same song playing with non-lullabic intensity in Abercrombie & Fitch, it seems, every time you enter. The bass pulsing from somewhere inside you, like that scent—Fierce, Abercrombie calls it—that either comes from every molecule of the store itself or from somewhere inside you as an autonomic response to being inside the store.
Let’s pause for a moment.
Did you notice the use of both everytime and every time near the end of the last paragraph? Look again. What are the differences between the usage of these words in the phrases “Everytime We Touch” and “every time you enter”? The latter refers to each individual time you enter, for example the first time you enter Abercrombie & Fitch and are overwhelmed by the swoopy-haired employees and fog of Fierce.
Could “Everytime We Touch” also refer to the individual times two people touch? It could, but it does not.
A SECOND, ABBREVIATED, AND MORE DIRECT CONTEXT OF CASCADA’S “EVERYTIME WE TOUCH”
“Everytime We Touch” is not a song about an event. It is a song about feeling. Not even a feeling—just feeling. The song gives no specific details and makes no reference to any particular times we touch. “Everytime We Touch” is referring to a continuous and undefined experience. Cascada does not sing about each touch we have experienced. The song does not even attempt to define who “we” are. Everytime, in this instance, is something felt beyond an isolated experience. This is what dance music aspires to, or at least this is what listeners of dance music aspire to feel.
Suppose this is why “Everytime We Touch” is always playing when you enter Abercrombie. If Abercrombie sold an event—something singular and definite—you could purchase it and be done, but Abercrombie sells something else. Abercrombie sells a perfume that you don’t have to purchase but that follows you out of the store, anywhere you go, to your home, where it sneaks from a bag by your bed for months unbothered.
You don’t need to listen to the words of “Everytime We Touch” to understand: it’s the feeling itself you’re after, the feeling that your heart might circulate with something more than blood and oxygen.
CLOSING SPACE AS A WAY OF LIMITING DEFINITION AND EXCLUSION
Some words function as open compounds: the two words together, despite a space in between them, take on a new meaning. Think of kick drum, mini skirt, cargo shorts. For determiner expressions, however, the open variants do not have distinctive meanings. Only in their compound form—which is always closed, without spaces—does a new meaning emerge.
Consider the differences between every day and everyday. Every day refers to all definite days, as in “every day we touch I get this feeling.” On each and all of the days that we touch, the speaker gets that feeling. Everyday refers to something undefined, something expanded to become common or routine, as in “our everyday touch gives me this feeling.” This is a type of touch—one that has become regular—that precipitates the feeling.
Notice how every day, by being definable, maintains space for modification. For example: “every good day we touch I get this feeling.” This excludes days that are not good. Think of the textual space as creating a semantic space where further specificity can be added, creating exclusion of certain meanings.
Let’s apply this principle to “Everytime We Touch.”
If the line changed to read “Every Time We Touch,” there would be room for a modifier between the words every and time. For example: “Every Good Time We Touch.” However, the remainder of the song’s lyrics point to Cascada’s intention to maintain an all-encompassing and undefined everytime. The song’s bridge clarifies that, in fact, “the good and the bad times / we’ve been through them all,” in which case the titular line, if it did not use the compound everytime, would need amended to eliminate potential misreadings. But “Every Good and Bad Time We Touch” is not a good song title and would spoil the stresses in the melody.
If this seems extreme, it is. Grammar has a way of grabbing you by the mouth, the fingers, and saying, Listen, kid, it’s gonna be this way, in a nasty sort of 1940s mobster voice that makes you think this is not the type of person that you’d like to mess with (and grammar might also object to this use of prosopopoeia to humanize it, so proceed with caution). Except, because it’s grammar, despite the vaguely Brooklynite gangster drawl, grammar says, Listen, kid, your grammar is going to be spoken or written in this particular way that I am describing. Grammar is serious about this stuff.
There may exist in the world a false assumption that a 2000s Eurodance group would not have as much need for the nuances of grammar. This is mistaken. If Cascada has never expressed an interest in grammar, “Everytime We Touch” remains a testament to the group’s commitment to an undefined everytime. Consider a commonplace metaphor from the song’s second verse: “You make me rise when I fall.” Though this first appears as a cliché expression of support via ascension, that reading falls apart in the face of further metaphoric images:
Your arms are my castle
Your heart is my sky
Arms as castle align with the notion of support by both lifting up (a person literally stands within or upon a castle, which is itself traditionally built on higher ground) and protecting. In contrast, heart as sky places the speaker physically lower in the relationship and, furthermore, exposes the speaker to an open and unknown expanse. At the same time, the virtually limitless and inescapable nature of the sky serves as an encompassing and surrounding entity, like the castle. In other words, the everytime of “Everytime We Touch” resists defining its boundaries. It is an everytime that includes both above and below, exposed and protected, simultaneously.
For “Everytime We Touch,” everytime is a matter beyond grammar. It is a matter of consciousness and what we are willing to believe. It says this from the start. It says “I still hear your voice when you sleep next to me / I still feel your touch in my dreams.” Attempts to define this everytime are futile: it is a touch that foregoes the limits of even a physical world.
DETERMINING BETWEEN THE SPECIFIC AND THE INFINITE
Had you ever heard music like this before? Was Cascada playing on the radio? Rihanna was. And maybe, it’s possible, that Rihanna was also playing in Abercrombie & Fitch, maybe Ne-Yo, maybe Dido, but because these were all playing on the radio and in any other store within the mall, they are forgettable to the Abercrombie & Fitch experience. You have to believe that “Everytime We Touch,” if it wasn’t the only song playing in Abercrombie & Fitch circa 2005, was the only song you heard. It was the only song that gave you some sense of how the choices you made would determine who you were as a person—no, that was clear before; this song gave you a sense that all the choices you made would determine who you were as a person: what clothes you wore, what color Walkman you owned, what color iPod you were going to get, what ringtone you would put on your cellphone, what ringtone you did put on your cellphone, how low you wore your pants, how you swooped your hair—all of this determined something about you. You believe that Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch,” playing out of the speakers in an Abercrombie & Fitch at the Dayton Mall from 2005-2007 taught you this. Because of that, you can never separate this song from any of that again—from the mall, from Abercrombie, from cargo shorts and social norms, from a desire to be cool and the inescapable scent “of marine breeze, sandalwood and sensual musk wood notes.”
What can we learn from this?
Though the differences between compound determiner expressions and their uncompounded equivalents is not entirely consistent, patterns do emerge. As with every day and everyday, a similar effect occurs when changing any time to anytime. Compare these two instances:
Any time we touch
We can touch anytime
As already established, the first example allows space for possible exclusions: “any good time we touch,” “any dreaming time we touch.” But further differences appear when considering a third example with greater syntactical similarity to the first example: “anytime we touch.”
Remember that determiner expressions with spaces between words are not open compounds wherein the words take on meanings distinct from their isolated usage, so any and time maintain their typical meanings. “Any time we touch” refers to any individual time we might touch, which remains a particular time even if the specifics of that time remain unknown. “Anytime we touch,” however, refers to an undefined range, not singular times but all collective times. Thus, compound determiners are a matter not only of exclusivity but also of specificity.
Let’s again consider “Everytime We Touch.”
To say “every time we touch I get this feeling” is to say that there are specific times we touch, and each of those times we touch I get this feeling. Every referring to time. But “everytime we touch I get this feeling” says something different. Everytime functions with a collective, indefinite meaning. This time is a time of all possible times—everytime.
ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE FROM THE LIFELESS GRASP OF GRAMMAR TO COME TO A CONCLUSION OF MEANING, OR SIGNIFICANCE, OR SOMETHING WORTH MORE THAN MERELY OVERCOMING THE SQUIGGLY LINE CONDEMNING ERROR
Suppose there was once a time when you believed that everytime would last forever. Suppose it was this time—at the cusp of secular, public education—when you left a world of defined order, uniforms and church three days a week, and tried to determine a new one from the codes of middle schools and malls. Recall that in this context you did not need grammar. Suppose that all you needed was “Everytime We Touch,” a dance beat with no regard for anything specific.
This is not to say that Cascada should receive too much credit. For the sake of historical frankness, it’s worth noting that the song is not even original. All the songwriting credits date to the Scottish singer/songwriter Maggie Reilly’s 1992 track “Everytime We Touch,” which sounds more Chris Isaak meets Belinda Carlisle than Cascada’s radio-ready techno for teenagers. What Cascada did is not a remix nor a cover. The choruses are the same but, aside from references to the sky, the rest of the songs are not. This makes little difference, however, as neither offers much of anything particular in their lyrics. One could imagine the lyrics of either replacing the other with little to no effect. “Everytime We Touch” is, as this grammatical explanation has been adamantly saying, not about the particular.
Particulars can fade away. You finished the sixth grade and the seventh grade and there were more grades after that. You abandoned the cargo shorts and bootleg jeans and those weird cord-like belts with the metal rings to cinch them to your waist. Things that once seemed inseparable separated. You have not set foot in an Abercrombie & Fitch in maybe fifteen years. The shirtless men disappeared, and you forgot about that brand name for a long time.
But grammar is forever, at least until we change it.
This is how grammar functions: through rules—rules that shift with time and place and context. It may seem ill-advised to use pop songs as sources of grammatical diagnosis and prescription, but it is worth considering that some amount of disregard for rules can allow for things otherwise impossible to say. What appears to be a pre-automatic-Spell Check carelessness in “Everytime We Touch” reveals, perhaps, a capacity for the momentary to become eternal, for the particular to become general.
Everytime is still an unacceptable compounding according to most every credible source. It prompts red squiggly lines and angry internet posts. But I am drawn to believe that another definition of this word exists. When it comes to music and art I am always prone to wanting to believe in the possibility of something less definite, something that moves beyond the specific and toward the opposite—the ill-defined and infinite.
Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio living in Tucson, Arizona. He once wore cargo shorts on a regular basis. His writing has appeared in the Missouri Review, the Hedgehog Review, and the Smart Set.