Usher understands why his former record label mate didn’t join him at the Super Bowl.
The “Yeah!” singer led one hell of a halftime show in Las Vegas on Sunday and brought a number of special guests out to join him. While an insider has since offered the supposed reason for Justin Bieber’s absence from the show, Usher is now clarifying things himself.
He candidly did so after being asked on “The Breakfast Club” what happened.
“You know, I honored and recognized that my brother, Justin Bieber, you know, I think that it might’ve been the fact that he’s just wanting to tell a different story right now, and I understand that,” Usher said Friday.
“But we did have a brief conversation,” he continued. “And we’re going to do something else in the future. But no love lost or anything like that. I think that it’s a lot of pressure for the Super Bowl, obviously, for me to put together a show. So I reached out to everybody.”
The San Francisco 49ers still held a lead over the Kansas City Chiefs when halftime arrived and Usher performed parts of more than a dozen of his hits over the course of 13 minutes. Amid his roller-skating and taking his shirt off, he was joined by a whole team of stars.
These included Alicia Keys, Ludacris, Jermaine Dupri and Lil Jon — but not Bieber.
Usher said Friday that Bieber “wasn’t the only person” he’d asked to join him, but that a performance of such high visibility “was maybe for later.” Usher added that he was “curating what would be one of the greatest Super Bowls” ever.
“I reached out to some hitters,” the singer revealed on “The Breakfast Club.”
“He’s going to play the Super Bowl,” he added about Bieber. “I’ll go ahead and give you that — in the future. I’ll profess that, over his life and over his time, you know, it’s time, because he has a career that deserves it. It just didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to.”
These words were perhaps more clarifying than those of the insider who told Page Six that Bieber “just wasn’t feeling it.” Still, Bieber did support Usher — whom he last collaborated with on 2010’s “Somebody To Love” — by attending the game.
“Love you my brother,” Bieber wrote earlier this week in an all-caps social media post about the halftime show. “Love you from the depths of my heart. Brought the ‘A’ to the world, only you babyyyyyy.”
As for any other stars Usher may have reached out to for the show, he wasn’t willing to share their names Friday.
“I can’t give you that exclusive,” he said.