Welcome to the New York Times Pop-Cast, your highway or my way of music news and criticism.

I'm your host John Garamonica. You are listening to be the one with

you a relationship with you.

You are listening to my favorite usher song of all time. That's you make me wanna. This is, whoa, doesn't really get much better than this. This is early-ish usher, young usher, real talk usher,-confessions usher, but still confessing.

Usher is about to perform at the Super Bowl this coming weekend and I thinkher's curiously under-disgust, undervalued, under-conversed.

And so this week we're going to get into Usher's career.

We're going to talk the early years. We're going to talk

Usher's relationship to Classic R&B, New Jack Swing, Hip Hop, also Later Usher, EDM, pop, trap, etc.

We're talking about the various phases of his career.

We're gonna talk about the way that Usher celebrity

sometimes got in the way of how his music was received and we're going to talk about

Usher as a technician and a practitioner of the form which also I think sometimes

doesn't get as much lip services probably should so to get into that this week we've got two

guests. We've got Danielle Amir Jackson and Thomas Hobbs. Danielle is the

editor-in-chief of Oxford American and also recently profiled Usher for The Times magazine.

Danielle, hi, welcome the popcast.

Hi, thank you for having me.

Of course, Thomas Hobbs is a freelance music writer, writes for The Guardian, Evening Standard,

stereo gum, also recently profiled usher for the evening standard.

Thomas, welcome to Popcast.

Hey, very cool to be here.

Um, psyched to have y'all for a number of reasons.

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