Usher Moves Some Mountains, Gets Back Together With His Moms

noah | August 7, 2008 8:53 am

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Usher’s latest album, Here I Stand, was something of a flop, despite him going to every show on the cable dial to promote it. (It’s sold a relatively paltry 948,000 copies in 10 weeks, and had no top-10 singles after the No. 1 hit “Love In This Club.”) So he’s fired his manager Benny Medina and lured his mom, Jonnetta Patton, away from her gig as a “full-time grandmother” and back to the role of his manager. Will this result in the album shooting back up the charts and selling as many copies as Tha Carter III, or even the nine-times-platinum Confessions? Medina sure doesn’t think so!

For his part, Medina defended the sales drop in his own statement to People.

“With an artist like Usher, the bar is set really high. Whether it was management, marketing or the music, we achieved a #1 single and a #1 album,” he said. “It is a completely new day and time in music now. In four years, his audience, demographic and musical direction has changed. Records like Lil Wayne’s ‘Lollipop’ are the type of phenomena that ‘Yeah’ was in 2004.”

Is that his way of saying that “Love In This Club” was kind of not as good as “Yeah”? Let it burn, Benny, let it burn!

Usher Rehires Mom As His Manager [MTV] [Photo: AP]

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