Funny thing about listening to Usher’s last album, “Here I Stand”.

He’s been compared to Michael Jackson in almost every way throughout his career. These days you may be able to compare him to Michael in the sense that he almost comes off as uninspired and set in his ways as Michael has become. When people want Michael, almost beg him, to use producers other than himself for the meat of the album he always tends to fall back on the novelty of what happened when him and Quincy Jones were much younger and he created brilliant pop music. Those days are over, yet you can’t tell him that and it’s understandable. Every artist that has come after Michael has been accused of being overproduced or having too many great minds in the studio at some point or the other and has suffered for it. Madonna’s last album, “Hard Candy” is a testament to that fact, as are about the last 3 albums his sister Janet has put out.

So why wouldn’t Usher; who isn’t really that old to begin with, not mix things up a bit on ‘Here I Stand’, when he has a sophomore breathing down his back? Exactly what has Chris Brown done that Usher hasn’t done before, or won’t do?

What plagues Usher is that he is brilliant at laid back, smoothly orchestrated intricate compositions where the pop music comes in and out at a nice pace. In fact he is entirely too good and faces becoming the next MOR of pop music. To his own credit, he has utilized producers with the latest techniques on songs like “Love In This Club” the “Yeah” of his previous record, “Confessions”, but to his downfall similar techniques were used elsewhere on the record on tracks that were sophisticated and easy going but lacking any real emotion or soul.

Take “Before I Met You”, a very easy listening cut, but one that only his older listeners could truly appreciate. What Usher is lacking is the mindlessness of that aggressive pop music that Chris Brown offers on songs like “Forever”, or “No Air”. This is uncompromising, unrelenting pop music that sets you clear in it’s sights and does not let you go. To his own credit, Usher was never really about that type of pop music but given the current climate of pop music, much of which is become about revisiting or updating traditional electro-pop sounds he may want to think about giving his listeners a bit more of the trend to push sales.

Personally I will continue to listen to Usher because he is a solid artist and quite honestly I haven’t really seen anything as thorough or thoughtful as what he puts out. He still has a considerable amount of years in front of him. But I may have to resign myself to the fact that, as has been with a lot of the artists that I love, he just isn’t going to get the sales numbers that the latest “it” artist are going to command. Doesn’t mean that he has a bad record, just means that it’s not totally in sync with where the rest of pop culture is at.