Photo by me

Usher can't decide whether he's young or old, so he's trying to be both, and it's a little weird.

But the 32-year-old can still kind of dance like he used to, and sure does have some modern R&B/club classics.

The Southern pop star kicked off his American "OMG" tour with a sold out concert at KeyArena last night. Young-gun opener Trey Songz outperformed him, musically, but that's another story.

The arena belonged to Usher, who trotted out so many hits they required two separate montages, and he brought out the big guns, literally: Of several pyrotechnic explosions, my favorite was the one Usher triggered with a James Bond-style gilded pistol. The most visually effective stunt accompanied "There Goes My Baby" (2010); Usher stood on a platform raised to the heavens, wind-blown fog on the stage beneath him simulating cloud cover.

The audience — lots of twenty/thirtysomething women in heels and dresses — followed Usher from the zig-zag crunk of "Yeah!" (2004) all the way back to "Nice and Slow" (1997), singing every word to the slow jam as he got down and humped the stage.

"You Make Me Wanna" (1997) was another sexy high point. The nylon-string guitar&B smash conjured a bygone era in MTV/BET pop, and Usher performed part of it shirtless, and then for a few deafening seconds, pantsless.

That was the old Usher, who would offer to freak you right, and strip for you.

The new Usher is all about what you can do for him. In recent radio hit "Little Freak" he does not ask, but demands that if you're a woman who wants to have sex with him, you must have a menage-a-trois and "let her put her hands in your pants." Usher's forceful tone coupled with the song's sinister-sounding beat makes for an uncomfortable pairing, like, yeah, we get it, Usher can have a three-way whenever he wants, but does he have to be so harsh about it? As he performed "Little Freak," four back-up dancers mimed stripper moves on poles behind him. But the tour's named after the song "OMG," which Usher sang "oh my GOSH." Why exactly? Because he's enforcing some amount of kid-friendly decency? Right.

He made a few semi-apologetic onstage references to his pop longevity, which isn't anything to be embarrassed of unless you're an old man trying to play a young man's game. His stage show did bear some resemblance to his teenage protege Justin Bieber's — the platform floating over the audience, for example. Watching Usher on that platform performing "Monstar" (2010), it hit home that the man is lost, flailing for a new sound, halfway successfully grafting UK dubstep onto disco pop.

The dancing was good. Usher traversed the stage in great slides, riding one of two long treadmills also used by a fleet of backup dancers. But his best moves were minimalist and stationary, sleight of hand but with his feet. Usher's not doing standing 720 spins like he used to, but his heel-toe work was formidable, fluid, and all of a sudden impossible, involving stalls on the edges of his shoes.