![]() ![]() “The pain in the ass? Yeah, absolutely,” he says. Asked if he still sees that precocious teen in Usher today, Pitts laughs fondly. The two have history: A teenage Usher briefly lived in New York with Pitts and Sean Combs, who were rooming together at the time, while recording his self-titled 1994 album, and Pitts had a top A&R role at Arista during Usher’s early-2000s tenure there. It’s also where Usher gets to work with longtime friend Mark Pitts, who was named label president in January. RCA is, of course, not a bad place to be for an R&B artist - right now, it’s home to next-generation powerhouses like Khalid, SZA, H.E.R., Normani, Doja Cat and Jazmine Sullivan. Usher has also spent the last few years working on his ninth studio album - his third on RCA - which he expects will roll out later in 2021. “Between hosting the iHeart Radio Awards and now the residency, the purpose was to reactivate and reenergize Usher’s multigenerational fan base at a time when youth is dominating with Spotify, Apple and other. (The group will return to Planet Hollywood for a Christmas residency in November.) “Usher understands what it means to level up,” says Laffitte. Laffitte was the one who suggested a residency to Khan - he also manages the Backstreet Boys, whose first Vegas residency, which ran from 2017 to 2019, was a springboard for a subsequent world tour and the group’s first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 in almost 20 years. Still, Vegas is just one part of a multipronged plan to reintroduce Usher and his catalog to the public, according to Laffitte, who took him on as a client two years ago. “I would call myself ‘seasoned’ more than ‘elder statesman,’ ” he says, smiling. But while the enthusiastic response to his Vegas residency suggests he could easily coast on nostalgia, Usher isn’t ready to settle into legacy-artist status just yet. In that time, the growth of streaming has reshaped the music industry, hip-hop has become the dominant cultural force, and a new generation of R&B prodigies has revived the genre - and also made it more competitive than ever. Usher also hasn’t released a proper studio album since 2016’s Hard II Love, which yielded two top 10 singles on the Adult R&B Songs chart but became his first album in 12 years to not debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, ending a four-album streak that began with 2004’s blockbuster Confessions. ![]() I don’t think there’s a person on the planet that doesn’t know the words to ‘Yeah!’” ![]() “People want to party in Vegas, and there’s no greater soundtrack than Usher’s hits with their multigenerational and global appeal. “This is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time,” says Amanda Moore, senior vp Las Vegas residencies at Live Nation Entertainment. (It was originally scheduled to open last July, and completes a string of summer dates in August before returning in December.) He’ll be joined in town this year by returning residency headliners like Bruno Mars (whose Park MGM residency has grossed $29.1 million from 25 shows, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore) and Gwen Stefani ($22 million from 49 shows at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas), as well as Vegas first-timers like Perry and Carrie Underwood (whose shows will debut in December). And with nine Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s to his name - tied with the Bee Gees, Elton John, Katy Perry and Paul McCartney for the 10th most in the chart’s history - he is a fitting choice to help welcome back Vegas nightlife with one of the first major residencies since the pandemic began. Watching the lithe 42-year-old, even in rehearsal mode, is a reminder of the dazzling showmanship that set him apart from his pop and R&B peers when he first started scaling the charts in the 1990s. It makes perfect sense that Usher would end up on a Sin City stage. “But with this, I was given an opportunity to be a little theatrical, so I decided to make the show an evolution of all my work.” “I always put so much effort into the choreography of these songs and the emotional aspect,” he says. He powers through some of his early-2000s hits in quick succession: “Lovers and Friends,” “Bad Girl,” “My Boo,” “U Remind Me.” Later that night, in a black-and-white backstage suite that was originally built for Céline Dion - it includes a dressing room, a kitchen, a conference room and a separate garage housing his motorcycle - he says he has been relishing the creative freedom of a residency like this. Against a backdrop of a neon-lit city skyline that stretches the width of the massive stage, the superstar and his dancers - including several zipping about on skates - gyrate around a dozen floor-to-ceiling pillars that give the roughly 4,300-seat theater some added drama. USHER MONEY FULLHe’s wrapping up the first day of rehearsals with the full cast and crew for his first Las Vegas residency, which will open in just 10 days, on July 16. ![]()
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