The R. & B. megastars seem to think their genre needs saving. But from what?
He was a love object at ninety-six pounds. Little Frankie Lymon on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” snapping his fingers, flashing his new adult teeth. That the thirteen-year-old boy soprano from Harlem already knew a thing or two about hustling—that street precocity did not surface in his act. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the doo-wop group he fronted, were slicked-back conks, they were letterman sweaters, they were loafers, they were noncoital sweet talk. Which was a nonnegotiable, what with the Teenagers being pubescent Black and Latino kids from around the way. Their first single, a lament co-written by Lymon, reached No. 1 on the Billboard R. & B. chart in early 1956. Tell the schoolyard lovesick, Frankie, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” He felt he knew. Grown women whom he slept with sometimes posed in mixed company as Sister or Mother. At twenty-four, the soprano ability gone, his coffers emptied by heroin and scammers, Lymon, in his addict’s senescence, spoke to a reporter from Ebony magazine; a year later, he would be found dead on his grandmother’s bathroom floor. In the interview, Lymon thought aloud on the erratic character of teen stardom, that volatile advertisement of innocence always tipping into insolence, which had ruled the popular-music industry in the fifties: “I never was a child, although I was billed in every theater and auditorium where I appeared as a child star. I was a man when I was 11 years old, doing what most men do.”
The two former teen idols I had gone to see perform at MetLife Stadium in early August—had they, as young, packaged, Black-boy love objects, been “doing what most men do?” You wonder about them, Usher and Chris Brown. Each man now appears, in his own way, timeworn. With Usher, who is forty-seven, it’s his inveterate agelessness, his pickling of his body in peak form, a kind of externalization of performer’s paranoia. With Brown, who is thirty-seven, it is in his hollowed-out jawline, and his body, too, fully tattooed or marked by his hard-knock adulthood. The pedigrees are not dissimilar. A parent notices the singing and dancing talent in the child, who is well churched. Phone calls and demos get made. There is scrounging to pay for flights to meet with executives in New York City and/or Atlanta. A season of mysterious grooming comes after, under the aegis of a Berry Gordy-like force, the period when the biological parents relinquish power and recede, so that in their absence the child star can be born. Usher, a protégé of L. A. Reid, débuted at fourteen, in 1993, with “Call Me a Mack”; Chris Brown, at fifteen, in 2005, with “Run It!” The two introductory salvos share a metaphor, that of dirty macking, or, in the context of post-Motown star-making, generational insurrection—the young-buck interloper sliding on the scene and declaring the girl, a.k.a. the audience, his to have, and her old man obsolete. The music is so sticky, and it is so good.
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