Usher and Chris Brown’s Audacious Joint Tour

That Friday, the sky had opened up. MetLife, an outdoor venue, was drenched, and the start was delayed. Guest Services gave out plastic ponchos. Workers had placed tarps on the stage, which was shaped like a massive arrow, to collect the storm. DJ Fresh, now acting as Brown’s hype man, did the warmup, vamping at his decks. Everyone whooped when he boomed into his mike that no one was scared of a little motherfucking rain. He did his casual-musicologist thing, plying the audience with crowd-pleasing summer songs like Cameo’s “Candy,” and slow jams like Tevin Campbell’s “Can We Talk.” A roving camera blasted people in the stands onto the jumbotron. Then Fresh, a conspiratorial look drifting across his face, announced that he was going to “try something.” R. Kelly’s “Bump n’ Grind” started up, and the people responded affirmatively. The lyric “I don’t see nothing wrong / with a little bump and grind,” representative of the acts of the man who had recorded it, currently in federal prison for racketeering and sex trafficking, was the maxim of the night: permissiveness, freedom in your body and whatever it decided it wanted to do.

Was that audacity? Fresh knew the crowd he was playing to. To some, R. Kelly will always be Kellz, that savant figure, recipient of unending esteem, because of what he did for the culture, so to speak. This is who “The R&B Tour” is for. Around 9:30 P.M., the lights got low, a janky animation of the cosmos filled the screen, and our stars walked on—Usher shirtless with a floor-length fur coat, and Brown in a moto jacket. The approach of the former was to pause and bask; the latter, to launch with his backup dancers into a complicated set of steps. They seemed not at odds, but not connected, either, even when doing a give-and-take intro performance of their 2017 song “Party.” Why had they paired up? There was a tease, in October of last year, at the Atlanta stop of Brown’s solo “Breezy Bowl XX” tour, which grossed nearly three hundred million dollars: the two hugged onstage, and Brown called Usher his “brother.” (This was a necessary dispelling of the rumor that the two had got into a physical fight outside an Atlanta skating rink.) Their fraternity is in a manufactured inheritance narrative, each performer jockeying, after Michael Jackson, to be the King of R. & B.

Early on in the show—a disjointed three-hour spectacle, featuring nearly sixty truncated songs, some ill-conceived A.I. interstitials, and one fire-breather—a video collage offers an (all-male) pantheon of the R. & B. greats. No Lymon, naturally, and no Bobby Brown, the pretty bad boy of the eighties and early nineties who bridged hip-hop and R. & B., and who seems the true predecessor to Chris Brown. Instead, a predictable picture of music dominance: Luther Vandross, Prince, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye in his crochet beanie. An animated Chris Brown downloads their juice, “transferring data” to his person. We are reminded that the teen-age Brown was pretty, too, selling Wrigley’s Doublemint gum in a TV spot; tipping his fedora, Mike Jack-style, to hip-switching girls on the block in a music video; doing Donny Hathaway mimicry in a Black family Christmas movie. The present-day Brown dances to “Yo (Excuse Me Miss),” one of those early, polite songs, as projections of his younger self fill the screen, and you can’t tell who is the shadow of whom. How he narrativizes his subsequent fall, following his arrest for assault and battery of this hemisphere’s then ascendant pop star, takes shape in a couple of so-called comeback albums, “Graffiti,” “F.A.M.E,” and “Fortune.” Written with collaborators such as Kevin McCall and Sevyn Streeter, the lyrics skew unrepentant fuckboy, the sound narcotic. “I’m chucking up my deuces to her.” “Look at me now, I’m getting paper.” “These hoes ain’t loyal,” and so on.

When Brown was a kid, he copied the choreography to Usher’s “My Way.” He was sold as a sort of Usher variant when he débuted; his singles, some of which were produced by the hitmaker Scott Storch, were further crunked-up versions of Usher’s discography. This is a tension in the tour. Usher does rule the roost, because his showmanship is so relaxed, honed, as it has been, by Vegas residencies. He was like a live Teddy Pendergrass then, maestro of the boudoir. It was his “My Way” residency, capped off with his 2024 Super Bowl performance, that launched his R. & B. reclamation project, as filtered through his diamond run of turn-of-the-millenium albums, “8701,” “Confessions,” and “Here I Stand.” At MetLife, Usher could not stop praising “8701,” which had just turned twenty-five years old, and which was, in a sense, a coming-out album: his openly idolatrous effort, guided by Jermaine Dupri, the Neptunes, and other visionaries, at imitating seventies soul men like Gaye. But Usher lost the thread with a subsequent tour, called “Past Present Future.” Fans wanted him to stay ossified; they weren’t into the halting experimentation of “Coming Home,” the album that he released in 2024. And so the current Usher is a legacy act, the lover who overstays his welcome.