Usher has revealed that his Super Bowl Halftime Show this Sunday will be 15 minutes long, as opposed to the standard 13 minutes usually allotted for the halftime show. "I can't explain why, but it's a funny thing that I was able to do and craft. That was a huge strategic thing that happened between me and my agency," Usher said of the extended runtime.
Furthermore, Usher told Entertainment Weekly that he sees the Super Bowl Halftime show as the finale of his Vegas residency, which ended its two-year run last year. "I went to Las Vegas with only the belief that people would come because nobody was going anywhere. You have to understand how much of an unwavering belief a person had to have to put together a show after a year of nobody going anywhere and everybody being afraid to be outside for fear of catching COVID or endangering themselves and their families. So the fact that I did that was just truly a matter of belief, and that belief was all positive," Usher said.
Usher & Others Parody Hangover To Promote Halftime Show
Meanwhile, Usher also joined a stacked cast in Where's Usher?, a short film from Apple Music to promote his halftime performance. In the 7-minute feature, Ludacris, Lil Jon, and Taraji P. Henson have to track down Usher in Vegas after losing him, a la The Hangover.
Along the way, the trio runs into Anderson.Paak, the Blue Man Group, Wesley Snipes, J. Balvin, Andre 3000's voice, and "Blanche". As the short is pretty much a 1:1 parody of The Hangover, it of course ends with the trio finding Usher on the roof of their hotel and they are able to tell Apple CEO Tim Cook that the halftime show can go ahead as planned. It's a fairly amusing, if crushingly corporate, way to promote the halftime show. However, at the end of the day, "fairly amusing but crushingly corporate" is a pretty fitting description for existence in 2024 so maybe the Super Bowl is simply playing 4D Chess.