That Usher would arrive at Looking 4 Myself seems like a natural result of his musical Benjamin Button act.
In that sense, Looking 4 Myself, as the numerical substitutions in the album’s title and song cycle would suggest (to say nothing of the cover art’s depiction of Usher with a faux-hawk and neck tattoos), is something like baby Benjamin Button’s death, but it’s followed by an attempted resurrection. The album continues the trajectory charted above by opening with probably the single most perplexingly senseless piece of music in either Usher or producer wiil.i.am’s career—and in the latter’s case, that’s saying a lot. “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop” is yet another dispiritingly hollow attempted revver-upper in the Pitbull/LMFAO mode, though one that frustratingly never busts loose, instead alternating between a synchronous, syncopated breakdown and a tacky interpolation of the bridge from Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl.” That Max Martin’s more boilerplate club banger “Scream,” which follows “Can’t Stop” on the album, doesn’t come off as crass is only due to its proximity to what has to count among the lamest opening shots of all time. Unless that was the intention. I admit, it seems unlikely that many pop music artists would deliberately fake out their audience, but one has to wonder if Usher’s decision to open up what eventually reveals itself to be his highly nomadic tour through genres by picking up the moron baton from “OMG” wasn’t deliberate.
I’d like to think it was. Usher has said he was inspired to really broaden his horizons after a trip to Coachella. While that statement only confirms his interloper status, it also suggests that he was making a conscious choice to separate himself from the status quo represented by the album’s opening numbers. As if to drive the point home, the album’s third song, the Diplo-produced “Climax,” might be one of the best things he’s ever done. Boasting a spare, echoing sound that always seems to be on the verge of exploding into fireworks (no more so than when the strings begin swirling halfway through), “Climax” is an exercise in internalized sensation.
From this juxtaposition, Looking 4 Myself truly begins its journey, never settling on any style for longer than one song or two. “I Care for You” flirts with dubstep lite (whereas the haunting “Sins of My Father” goes further back with hints of just plain dub), the Neptunes-produced “Twisted” bests Bruno Mars at his retro, skinny-tie doo-wop game, and the album’s title track gets all electro-pop sunny with Empire of the Sun. Usher being Usher (and past being Versus himself), the album’s stabs at experimentalism venture only so far. It’s worth noting that he saves some of the most standard-issue R&B (“I.F.U.” and the aptly titled “Hot Thing”) for the deluxe edition, and ends the album proper with “Euphoria,” a Swedish House Mafia production that returns him back to square one. Maybe someday Usher will craft an album fresh from an investigative visit to Burning Man. Until then, the unavoidably uneven but fresh Looking 4 Myself will have to do.