Put it out there, like, ‘That’s how I feel, you gonna ride with me, or you gonna leave me?'” Later, he kept insisting that the song wasn’t really about him: “You have heard a lot of farfetched things - ‘Yo, did you get a girl pregnant?’ Nah, that was the creativity of music.” It didn’t matter. That’s what I think women need, a real cat that’s gonna get real with them. This song is a dramatization where a guy confesses all the stuff he’s been doing. Even before the album came out, Usher tried to explain “Confessions Part II” to MTV: “I can’t say it’s a real-life, but I know guys who go through that and might feel that.
The general public also thought that Usher was singing about his own experiences on “Confessions Part II.” Usher tried to combat that impression from the beginning.
I heard her do an interview one day, and she was talking about it like we wrote about her. She started believing that these songs were about her. It was so mysterious that Chilli actually started believing it. And even though “Part II” was my story, it still was mysterious for him because if you got a girlfriend and you tell her you got a girl on the side who’s got a baby, it creates this mystique. I think loved it because it was mysterious. Here’s how Dupri explains the appeal of “Confessions Part II”: Dupri and Cox didn’t know if Usher would want to record a song that gnarly, but Usher was enthusiastic. Dupri says that he wrote the “Confessions Part II” lyrics in half an hour. “Confessions Part II” was originally supposed to be a remix to the first “Confessions,” and Dupri wasn’t even sure either song would make the cut for the album. With those tracks, Dupri was drawing on his own experience he claims he’d just “gone through ‘Part II’ in real life.” Both tracks came from the same trio of songwriters who also made “Burn”: Usher, Dupri, and Dupri’s regular collaborator Bryan-Michael Cox. In a Complex interview a decade later, Jermaine Dupri explained that he’d been trying to “create a ruckus” with those “Confessions” songs. It sounds pretty bad! And then it gets so much worse. He was hand-in-hand in the Beverly Center, not giving a damn who saw him. It had been going on so long, and he had been doing his main girlfriend so wrong. On that first song, Usher explained that he’d been going to Los Angeles for work but also to spend time with an ex. On “Confessions Part I,” Usher’s narrator admitted that he’d been cheating, that he had a chick on the side with a crib and a ride. “Confessions Part II” was the second half of a diptych on the Confessions album. Other than the one week when Fantasia’s American Idol coronation song “ I Believe” topped the chart, Usher ruled the Hot 100 from February 2004 through August. After Usher’s heartbroken breakup ballad “ Burn” replaced his club banger “ Yeah!” at #1, “Confessions Part II” knocked “Burn” out of the top spot. “Confessions Part II” was the third single from Usher’s Confessions album, and it was also the third #1 hit. As an adult in a public relationship, Usher used that persona as fuel, and he involved the whole world in his storytelling. Since he was a little kid, Usher cultivated an image, depicting himself as an incorrigible flirt. But “Confessions Part II,” from its title on down, also plays on Usher’s bad-boy tabloid persona.
It gives us the same kind of cheating narrative that Billy Paul told in “ Me And Mrs. In some ways, “Confessions Part II” fits into a grand tradition of R&B storytelling. So these were somebody’s confessions, even if they weren’t Usher’s. Instead, chief Usher collaborator Jermaine Dupri later confirmed that “Confessions Part II” was, in fact, his own story. But that doesn’t mean that “Confessions Part II” is fiction. Usher never had to tell a girlfriend that he’s gotten some other girl pregnant. These are not really Usher’s confessions. I love it.įor all its apparent emotional shitbaggery, “Confessions Part II” is pure theater. But who is he kidding? Who would give anybody another chance after some shit like that? Who would be able to look at this guy the same way again? The story behind “Confessions Part II” is heavy shit, and yet Usher delivers it while wailing in a buttery falsetto and hitting all kinds of fancy footwork in the video. And hopefully, you’ll give him another chance. He hopes you can accept the fact that he’s man enough to tell you this. He’s about to tell you, the woman he loves, that he’s having a baby by a woman that he barely even knows. Instead, he’s about to admit to relationship sins so vast and consequential that they would barely even work as credible soap opera fodder. It sounds like Usher is about to perform a magic trick or a double backflip. The “watch this” whisper is funny because it sounds like showing off.
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