At His First Dallas Show in a Decade, Usher Mixes Pleasure and Pain at AAC

Usher Raymond stood, draped in a floor-length fur coat the color of a ripe apple, and said nothing, a smile on his sweat-soaked face, as he bathed in adulation from all sides.

It was a rare pause during his relentless “Past Present Future” tour stop Thursday at American Airlines Center, the first of three nights and his first Dallas headlining appearance in nearly a decade.

The screams just kept building, cries of pleasure ricocheting off the rafters. He turned, methodically, to face each corner of the building, the smile never leaving his lips.

The 45-year-old superstar — who had, in fact, just finished singing “Superstar,” from his 2004 album Confessions (“This is for you, you, my number one”) — has built a career so formidable (100 milllion albums sold worldwide, 18 top 10 singles, eight Grammys) that, it would seem, no further validation is really necessary.

Such a moment is par for the course at large-scale pop spectacles like these — the multimillion records sold, awards earned, fans entertained, contemporaries influenced — none of those metrics really drives home accomplishment for performers like raw, uncut applause. The love, as it were, needs to be felt on both sides of the equation. But at the tail end of a nearly two-hour set, the Dallas-born and Atlanta-bred pop star brought the party to a halt, and spoke, seemingly off the cuff and from the heart, about the deeply raw personal connection he has to Dallas in particular.

“I want you to know how important these shows [in Dallas] are,” he said, standing alone at the foot of the immense, oval-shaped runway jutting out from the stage. “The D is where I landed on planet Earth. There is beauty in all tragic starts.”

Usher went on to relay the early dissolution of his parents’ marriage, the absence of his father through his youth and young manhood — “All I ever wanted was to get my father’s attention,” he said to a room full of riveted fans — and how his ceaseless drive led to “a different energy for Dallas.”

“If I didn’t have that tenacity, I’d have gotten lost, given up,” Usher said. “Every time I come to Dallas ... Dallas is really special to me. Tonight, I feel the spirit in here.”

Coming as it did on the heels of “Yeah!,” his smash 2004 single which, despite its age, still has the capacity to induce an entire arena to lose its collective mind, such an abrupt shift into the messy heart of what motivates him — the fierce desire for an estranged father’s affection, somewhat supplanted with the raving screams of 20,000 fans — complicated and enriched what was otherwise a high-gloss, non-stop showcase of just about every single corner of his nine-album catalog.

That Thursday’s performance was a smartly packaged fusion of his recent residency stint in Las Vegas and his well-received Super Bowl halftime gig from earlier this year was a given — Usher’s also been a go-for-broke pop performer for 30 years of his life, so such extravaganzas are probably something he could do in his sleep. Few would have begrudged him a comparatively laid-back victory lap, but he was not taking it remotely easy Thursday. Backed by about a dozen dancers, whose limbs displayed an often-terrifying elasticity, as well as a sharp, seven-piece band, complete with brass, and three back-up singers (all of whom were tucked alongside the immense video screen-platform combo dominating the center of the stage), Usher hit the ground running, blurring the boundaries between past and present.

Punctuating “U Remind Me” with a handstand, tooling around the oval runway on roller skates during “Don’t Waste My Time,” standing inside the mammoth, multilevel video box during “Burn” — as a CGI inferno appeared to swallow him whole — Usher delivered one striking tableau after another, stippled with lasers and spotlights and fog, smoothly integrating a time-hopping setlist with dynamic visuals and ceaseless bodies in motion.

“I am the party tonight!” Usher crowed at one point, working his way back to a satellite stage at the opposite end of the arena for an extended interlude, where he poured drinks from a working bar, flung thick wads of his “Usher bucks” into the audience and hand-fed maraschino cherries to eager women who looked as though, given the opportunity, they might have chewed his entire arm off.

As the night wore on, it all began to collapse into a permanent state of now — there became less distinction between past, present and future (“I Don’t Mind” spilling into “My Boo” tumbling into “Bad Girl” melting into “Good Kisser”), and more focus on simply surrendering to the hedonism — lights, lasciviousness, laughter — all around you. That beneath it all beat the bruised heart of a boy still trying to capture his father’s attention made such striving feel poignant — and more than a little bittersweet. Scaling such heights, and entertaining with such astonishing ease, with such an ache in your soul must make for moments of head-spinning anxiety.

Most global pop superstars reflexively tell audiences what they want to hear, and affirmations of the importance of their attention are boilerplate in such settings. The difference with Usher is that when he stops all of his exertions and really soaks up the ceaseless cacophony of an arena’s love, you get the strong sense it’s the furthest thing from an act.