the sweet 16

(14) Amerie, “1 Thing”
worked out
(2) Usher, “Yeah!”
270-237
and plays on in the elite 8

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 3/22/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

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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.

SERIOUS JOY: SEJAL SHAH ON AMERIE’S “1 THING”

This one thing, but I’m not telling you what it is—and it’s the secret ingredient in the secret sauce—the secret ingredient is what makes the secret house.  I looked it up, the lyrics, and what Wikipedia says, but with music, it’s how it makes you feel, not what others say about it. Still, here are a few things I want to say about Amerie’s “1 Thing”:
What I remember is dancing to this song in the house in the northeastern corner of Iowa, the driftless area, I rented for the academic year from a professor who was away in Copenhagen and in their little buttercream-colored house I danced at night. I was lonely. Nah nah nah nah nah oh (uh-uh). Was I going to find an academic job? It’s this 1 thing that got me trippin’. Is an academic job the way to happiness or a book? This one thing you did. For me it was neither, but I didn’t know that at the time. This one thing I want to admit it. I was dating the professor’s younger son. Ooh-wee, it felt so serious. I had also been out on some dates with a painter/chef at the local bistro. This one thing and I was so with it. It was hard to figure out. This was a town of 8,000. Blink and 20 years go by. Nah nah nah nah nah oh. Days go by. That was another song I was thinking about. What gets you tripping? The past is a head trip.
This one thing—what is it that makes a person right for another person? What’s the thing that makes a relationship last? What’s the thing that you can’t get over? And it’s exactly what I would say is not working in a student poem or story. Or one of mine. Here’s what I would write: “Thing” lacks specificity. It’s a thing. Can you be more specific? And yet, there is something about the thinginess of a thing. What’s your thing? What’s mine?

LOOKING AT SOME OF THE LYRICS:  

Trying to let it go

(this is me, in everything I write, this one thing, trying to let something go)

This one thing, your soul made me feel it

(What thing is it?)

Hey, we don’t know each other well

(No, that’s what makes it interesting)

Memories just keep ringing bells

(a song unhooks those memories, unfastens them, silvers them, sounds them)

I’m hoping you can keep a secret

(What’s the secret except this 1 thing?)
This one thing you did—when it’s something that someone has done to me, it has the whiff of the unforgiveable. But what if no one did anything and dancing is only another way to write?
While working on my story collection, I found myself listening to songs on repeat and dancing alone again in my house—it was the pandemic- and who could have imagined this one thing that kept us afraid and apart was also this one thing that drew us together as we tried to figure out what the next best step was.
I danced once to “Days Go By.” This is an essay, though, about “1 Thing.” I danced to many songs including “1 Thing.” This 1 thing I want to admit it.
Amerie singing at the top of the hill and I sat and danced in the yellow house on the hill, wondering what one thing it would be—a job or a person or event waiting to happen, which would give my life direction, a ballast. Things did happen. I got a job in New York. I didn’t marry either the painter/chef or my landlord’s son (also a painter), though he said he would have. I didn’t realize for a long time that he was serious (the landlord’s son). It’s not that I wasn’t serious, it’s just that I didn’t think of myself as having that 1 thing for someone else, being that it was easier to be aware of that 1 thing in someone else.
I didn’t realize for a long time how much I admired painters. This one thing and I was so with it. They say if you admire it then you should try it. I’ve been trying (this one thing) painting some watercolors. I didn’t get tenure. The times we never even got to speak. I left New York.
It took me a long time to see this one thing is whatever you make it. I couldn’t find it outside of myself. The song always surprised me, made me wonder—what is everyone else thinking the one thing is? Or is it just the hook and the beat and the danceability of it and no one really cares what that 1 thing is or is it that there’s some mystery and anyone can fill it—magic, that you are a painter or a chef or a 6’1” teacher or that dancing alone in a house on a hill can bring you some magic and that can be the one thing that keeps you going when you don’t know what comes next in your life—and let’s be real not one of us does. Dancing can keep you going when you are writing a book, and you don’t know if someone is going to ever publish it. It’s a romance. I did marry. Not the chef-painter, not my landlord’s son, but a middle school teacher, years later. He coaches tennis and champions my writing. What is the 1 thing? It’s the turning toward each other instead of turning away when it gets harder. I think that’s the 1 thing. That’s a thing, anyway.

What are some things I will remember?
Dancing at night in the house, before there was wi-fi so I was near my laptop, which was plugged in.

Oh, been trying to let it go

Why is it so hard to let anything go?

Trying to keep my eyes close

Should it be closed?

Trying to keep it just like before

Before, before, I can see before (painter/chef)

The times we never even got to speak

The time before you know it’s going to work out with someone—

Don't wanna tell you what it is 

Then when you know when it’s not going to work out, no matter how much you want it.

Do you even know what that 1 thing is?

I’m here to argue that we don’t. We just come up with reasons after—

Ooh-wee, it felt so serious

These things are serious! Even dancing alone is serious, because dancing is serious joy—

Got me thinking just too much

What is writing, but a different way of thinking?

They, we, are all of us married now. One to a psychiatrist, one I don’t know.

Na na na na oh (uh-uh).

I am writing this essay about a song, about how there was some joy in dancing even when lonely. More than writing a book, but if you are dancing while writing a book

Hear voices I don't wanna understand

Here I am talking about some thing

My car keys are jingling in my hand

Here I am telling you a story about two painters and a story collection

My high heels are clicking towards your door

And a tennis coach. It wasn’t a door, the way out is always on the dance floor, dancing, or toward a window, your eyes looking up

It's this one thing that got me trippin' (you did)
This one thing and I was so with it

Dancing with myself on a January night, not knowing what comes next, not knowing what the 1 thing was til I became the 1 thing

Trying to keep it just like before

There is no going back, but there’s always dancing, let me say that’s one thing that won’t forsake you.
Dancing is the secret house, is the way to write your secret book, is the way to make it real.

Sejal Shah is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Her debut story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press on May 1st, 2024. This hybrid book came together through a lot of dancing. Her essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, was a university common read, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and named in over thirty most-anticipated or best-of lists including Lit Hub, the Los Angeles Times, and PEN America. She lives in Rochester, New York. You can find her online @sejalshahwrites.