Ambition Inc.

The volume at Usher’s late afternoon sound check is so punishing that you need ear plugs, yet it’s nothing compared with the screaming of the 12,000 mostly female fans at the concert itself.

Decibel levels reach a peak when he prowls the edge of the American Airlines Center stage, asking playfully if there are any “bad girls” in the house.

Hundreds of girls and women scream, “me ... me!” Some are in their early teens, others are pushing 40; some conservatively attired, others in neo-lingerie.

Usher finally points to a lucky fan in her late 20s who all but hyperventilates as she is led to a waiting love seat on stage. He hands her a bouquet of roses, then drops to his knees and begins singing “Superstar.”

It’s a slow, sultry song in which the singer reverses roles -- he’s the groupie, showering his devotion on the superstar girl of his dreams. Their faces are just inches apart as he coos, “I dedicate this to my superstar ... for all time.”

The audience is transfixed, not knowing what to expect. The woman feverishly fans herself with both hands. Finally, a female in the audience shouts, “Kiss him, you fool.”

They embrace, and screams again fill the arena.

“It’s a classic R&B; moment,” a smiling Usher says backstage the next night in Houston. He’s wearing a tight Halle Berry T-shirt, which seems perfectly designed to show off a taut physique that’s the result of a three-hour-a-day workout.

“Lots of R&B; acts -- like Bobby Brown, Teddy Pendergrass, Jackie Wilson -- would bring girls on stage like that or sometimes a girl would just climb on stage herself. It’s entertainment.”

The comment says a lot about why Usher is on fire these days. Like one of his biggest show-biz influences, Michael Jackson, Usher grows out of the rich, sexy R&B; tradition. He doesn’t see music as an end in itself. It’s part of a larger entertainment world, including movies, he wants to rule. He studies it like a science, as fascinated with Will Smith and Fred Astaire as Prince and James Brown.

The dedication paid off in “Confessions,” a frequently compelling look at sexual temptation, consequence and regret that is the year’s runaway bestseller. The CD, which has sold more than 5.3 million copies since March, is likely to win the self-assured young singer a Grammy nomination for best album.

Usher’s live show too reflects his far-reaching ambitions, employing dancers, video screens, fireworks and, of course, sex to keep the customer satisfied. Asked if he considers dancing, singing or songwriting his greatest strength, he answers bluntly, “It’s my drive.”

You might add unwavering confidence. Who else would have risked being upstaged by the year’s most acclaimed newcomer, rapper Kanye West, whom Usher picked as the support act on the 42-date tour, which includes sold-out stops Monday and Thursday at Staples Center.

The freshest voice in hip-hop since Eminem, West combines the sonic bite of hard-core rap with uplifting themes on such tunes as the spiritually minded radio smash “Jesus Walks” from his debut CD, “The College Dropout,” which has sold 2.2 million copies.

On the album, which is also likely to win a Grammy nomination, West deals with matters ranging from education to drugs, mostly with a positive slant -- drawing upon pop-culture references (TV shows, movies, hip-hop lore, the streets) as freely as a magician pulls rabbits from a hat.

Like Usher, West sees himself as an entertainer rather than simply a music maker. Yet his approach is quite different, and he’s taken a completely different path to stardom. Usher’s sound and image have been carefully shaped with the help of top producers since he was in his teens. West has largely followed his own vision, designing hits for numerous other artists before making his own.

West holds the audience’s attention on stage with the power and persuasion of his words. Backed by just a turntable deejay and keyboardist, West paces the stage, telling stories about everyday life rather than recycling the hard-core rap elements that have become so painfully commonplace.

There isn’t a lot of screaming, but West’s themes are so engaging and his beats so catchy that the audience is on its feet for almost all of his 45-minute set -- a rare accomplishment for a support act.

“I feel at home doing this because I feel I am speaking for a lot of the people in the audience,” he says. “I’m an entertainer, but I also want people to feel like I’m a family member. What I’m trying to say in my music is there are other ways to think and dress and act.”

With appeal that’s part smarts, part seduction, Usher and West stand now at the epicenter of commercial pop. The joke in the industry, in fact, is that one reason tickets are selling so fast is that half of the audience consists of nervous record executives, hoping to learn why everything these artists touch turns to gold at a time when the rest of the music industry is in crisis.

White-hot -- and young -- these headliners are eager for more.

The soft-spoken West, 27, is so driven that he’s already got the ideas ready for his next album, which he’d like to have out by Christmas.

“I work to work harder,” a businesslike Usher, 25, says, calm and focused despite the frenzy around him. “I’m just getting started. If you asked me what stage my career is in, I’d say, it’s still the introductory stage.”

THE RIGHT PLACE ...

In one of the year’s great quotes in the R&B;/hip-hop world of flash and cash, Terence Carter, Usher’s affable road manager, told a Rolling Stone reporter shortly after “Confessions” was released, “Boy wears a $40,000 watch with the wrong time on it.”

Congratulated on the quip in Dallas, Carter fires back, “You’ve gotta update that, man. That was 3 million sales ago. Now, he’s got a $130,000 watch, but it still has the wrong time.”

Whatever the accuracy of the timepiece, the joke works because Usher seems to be running late from the moment he hits the floor in the morning. It’s not that he’s flaky or indulgent. He’s so focused on his music and career that he shuts out other considerations.

“In my 34 years in this business, I’ve never seen a guy with a better work ethic,” says tour manager Bill Thompson, who has worked with dozens of acts, including James Taylor, Metallica and Led Zeppelin. “He’s always trying to make the show or the music better. If you’re looking for answers to his success, start with him.”

The young singer moves about so fast backstage that his handlers could use golf carts to keep up with him as he darts between the dressing room and “meet and greet” sessions with radio contest winners to endless huddles with his musicians and choreographers.

But he’s as calm as any pop star you’re likely to find because he has a team of aides, including Carter and Thompson, to worry about the timetable for him.

In Houston, Usher had a light schedule. All he had to do before going on stage around 9:15 was a sound check, interview and brief “meet-and-greet” session with four dozen fans. Since he was due at the Toyota Center arena at 4:30, it looked like a piece of cake.

But no one figured on Usher stopping by a mall on the way to the arena. “I love my life, but there’s a longing to be normal sometimes,” he explains later in the day. “And that makes everyday things like stopping at the mall a real treat.”

He was, of course, mobbed and it was nearly 6 before he arrived at the arena. The brief sound check also ran long because he wanted to work with West on an arrangement for a song they were going to do together that night.

By 7:30, nervous sweat is starting to show on sidekick Carter’s face as he and tour manager Bill Thompson eye their watches. They finally break up the rehearsal so Usher can get to an interview and fan photo session.

In the sanctuary of the dressing room, Usher sheds some of the trimmings of the public persona. He places his diamond ring and Audemars Piguet watch on the table in front of him. He’s thoughtful and likable.

“Those are investments,” he says in passing. “I can give them to my kids or to friends or auction it off to charity. I don’t have stuff just because there is a whole bunch of diamonds in it.”

Usher Raymond IV is as relaxed as if he were sitting in the backyard of his estate near Atlanta.

“I’ve always seen myself like this,” he says. “It’s like I knew it was my destiny or something. When I signed my record contract, in my mind, I was already here, though I had many obstacles in front of me.

“I had a horrible case of acne and my voice changed and I could have lost everything. I was very, very sad for a while, but I didn’t give up because I knew I was meant to do this.”

EARLY PROMISE

If anyone was more convinced young Usher was going to be a star, it was his mother, Jonnetta, an insurance claims adjuster and church choir director who now manages his career. She joins him on some tour stops but mostly stays in her office in Atlanta.

Jonnetta was so sure of her boy’s gifts by the time he was 13 that she moved from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Atlanta, where there was more opportunity to launch a pop career. (Usher’s parents separated when he was 1.)

Sure enough, he was such a convincing singer and fluid dancer that he was signed within a year by LaFace Records, home of such R&B-pop; stars as TLC and Babyface. The label’s L.A. Reid, who now heads the Island Def Jam Record Group, knew Usher needed a strong producer to help shape a sound and image, so he put him together with one of the industry’s fastest-rising players, Sean “Puffy” Combs.

Even on the 1994 debut album, he was packaged as sex symbol, but he didn’t hit big. For one thing, it was hard for fans to believe he knew about all those steamy themes the producers put together for him. And it’s true, Usher acknowledges, he didn’t really know what he was singing about.

By the time he made the second album three years later with other producers, he was more ... experienced. “My Way” sold 4.1 million copies in the U.S. and at 19 he was on his way.

Rarely has a pop star been so single-minded on stage as Usher. On this tour, he’s usually moving his body suggestively, even grabbing his crotch at times a la Michael Jackson, and he plays the part of both the sensitive good boy and the unrepentant bad boy.

Before his oh-so-tender “Superstar” sequence in Dallas, for instance, he portrays an upscale pimp -- standing defiantly at center stage during “Bad Girl” while four scantly clad woman take the part of hookers who return from their exploits with money for him.

Usher doesn’t hesitate to play up the sex symbol business in the press, either. When encouraged to rate his sexual appetite on a scale of 10 in a new Blender magazine cover story, he responded “20.”

But he insists it is mostly image.

“As far as my sex life, I’ve seen a lot in my time, man, but I am now looking for something more than just physical,” he says backstage. “The most important thing is to find someone who understands that I can’t always be there, that I’m going to be in the studio for hours or on the road for weeks. I’m not in a relationship now. I don’t know if it’s even possible for me at this point.”

He raises eyebrows on the new album when he tells of a man informing his girlfriend about a heartbreaking transgression. In the two-part title tune, he confides:

Now this is going to be the hardest thing I think I ever had to do.

Got me talking to myself asking how am I going to tell you

‘Bout that chick from part one that I was creepin’ with.

Say she’s three months’ pregnant and she’s keepin’ it.

Interest was heightened because the song followed the breakup of his highly publicized relationship with TLC singer Rozonda “Chili” Thomas. Thomas, seven years older than Usher, suggested on an Atlanta radio station that he had been unfaithful.

Usher refuses to talk about the relationship. “All I’ll say about that is the one thing I wanted to do with this album is deal with real things,” he says.

“In fact, the first title we had for the album was ‘Real Talk.’ I was at a point in my music where I wanted to dig a little deeper, be a little more vulnerable. I spent hours and hours and hours with the producers talking about ideas and things we had all been through.”

That involvement is a key factor in Usher’s evolution as an artist. Many R&B; and pop hit-makers turn themselves over to producers who try to sculpt hits for them. The music sounds fabricated. But since the Combs days, Usher has become an active partner, using various producers (including such veteran hit-makers as Jermaine Dupri and the team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis) to help generate the music and themes he wants. He recorded 52 tunes before coming up with the 17 selections he put on the album.

“Every time you do a new show or a new album, you should take another step,” he says. “Most people would never record 52 songs because it’s so much work and it is expensive. But I never want to settle.”

When an aide steps into the room to remind him it’s time to get ready for the show, Usher picks up his watch and ring and puts them on. In the hall, Terence Carter even looks relaxed. It’s the one time each day Usher is never late.

AN EVERYDAY GUY

West’s pace isn’t nearly as frenzied as Usher’s, but he is also on the move these days. He only got an hour’s sleep the day of the Dallas show because he had to fly into town after an all-night video shoot in Los Angeles.

In Houston, he is constantly interrupted as he sits for an interview on a chair in an isolated hallway while Usher is preparing to go on stage. His set created such a buzz that almost everyone who passes by, from arena staff to caterers, stops to congratulate him.

It’s easy to see why he seems so approachable. There’s no swarm of security guards or entourage surrounding him. Equally crucial, West’s music seems so drawn from everyday life that it makes you feel comfortable walking up to him.

He exudes a natural warmth that would probably make him a winning film presence if he wants to go into movies. He’s got one of those million-dollar smiles.

West shares Usher’s desire to entertain the crowd, but he reaches out to the audience almost as an equal. This “natural-guy” demeanor separates West from the larger-than-life persona adopted by so many hip-hop stars. In fact, he stands apart the minute he steps on stage. Rather than the baggy jeans and sports jerseys favored by most rappers, West wears a beautifully cut $2,000 gray suit.

He has a passion for cool clothes (he says he never worked in fast-food places as a teenager because he didn’t like the uniforms), but his “ghetto preppy” look is also a statement of independence.

West’s latest hit single, “Jesus Walks,” is so imaginative and vulnerable that it ranks with Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” and Eminem’s “Stan” among the greatest rap tracks ever -- and he delivers it on stage with both authority and warmth.

In the song he talks about sin and salvation with rhymes that are furious and funny, flashy and streetwise. He touches on everything from the inner-city debate over the “white Jesus” and his own beliefs in a single verse:

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features.

Or here to create atheists into believers

I’m just tryin’ to say the way school need teachers

The way Kathy Lee need Regis

That’s the way I need Jesus.

On the album, West is as apt to salute Beck (“My teacher said I’s a loser, I told her why don’t you kill me”) as draw from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” (referring to his two near-fatal car accidents, he talks about using his two lifelines). The constant message is “Think for yourself.”

West got his feel for wordplay naturally. His mother, Donda West, was head of the English Department at Chicago State University, where he attended classes briefly before dropping out to pursue a music career.

Where Usher’s mom was helping guide him to a career, West’s was urging him to stay in college and get a degree. Sensitive to her feelings, he promised he would return to college if his career didn’t catch on within a year.

It looked for a while that he might have to do just that. He wasn’t convincing enough as a rapper at 19 to get a contract, even though Columbia Records showed enough interest to fly him to New York. West jokes now about how he may have killed the deal when he tried to overcome his nervousness through cockiness. “I told them I was going to be bigger than that,” he says. “They must have thought I was crazy. They ended the meeting with those three famous words: ‘We’ll call you.’ ”

Refusing to give up, West used his imagination and gifts to produce records for other artists, a list that now includes Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, Slum Village and Twista. With that resume, he was signed to Roc-A-Fella Records, aligned with Island Def Jam.

While making the debut album in Los Angeles, West, who now lives in Hoboken, N.J., was nearly killed when he fell asleep at the wheel one night while driving home after a marathon recording session.

Indicative of his own drive to get his rap career started, he recorded a rap about the experience while his jaw was still partly wired shut. The song, “Through the Wires,” became a hit and is a crowd favorite live.

What impresses most record executives is that West isn’t dependent on record producers. He’s a self-contained artist who produces his own recordings.

“I grew up loving hard-core rap, people like Scarface, Nas, Tupac, but that’s not what I want to write about,” he notes. “I don’t want to write about their lives. I want to write about mine.”

BUILT TO LAST?

Much of the excitement surrounding the new tour flows from the case it makes that Usher and West -- in an era when few acts seem to hold our attention beyond an album or two -- could well be the dominant R&B; and hip-hop voices, respectively, for the next decade.

The opening half-hour of Usher’s concert in Houston is carried as much by the enthusiasm of the audience as the music because the old hits feel generic. But things come alive with the “Confessions” album material in the second half, from the silky “Superstar” to the funky, Prince-influenced “Do It to Me.”

Given his talent and work ethic, Usher’s likely to keep churning out hits for years. The key question is if that’s enough for him. Is the man who enjoys the tag “Mr. Entertainment” mostly driven to be the biggest possible star or does he also strive for artistry?

It’s not a new crossroads. Michael Jackson faced a similar choice after “Thriller” and he took the wrong path, racing so hard after sales that he lost track of the human element in his music. Usher is aware of that history.

Even he may not know how he’ll respond to the success of “Confessions,” however, until he goes into the studio again with his team of writers and producers and finds out whether everyone is more excited by the 5.3 million sales or that “Confessions” was a major creative step forward.

Watching West on the same stage both nights, you have the feeling his long-range objectives are clearly aligned with artistry. He may not be able to make another album as stirring and as original as “The College Dropout,” but you know he’s going to try.

Then again, if Usher ever needs ideas in the hits or artistry department, he could always call on producer West. They respect each other immensely. Usher has already reached out to West to rap on a remix of the song “Confessions Part II.” The remix has been sent to radio, and West came on stage during Usher’s set in Houston to perform the new version with him live for the first time.

While Usher twists his body to punctuate the silky R&B; strains, West stays true to his own path. He simply paces the stage, channeling all his energy into making the words resonate. He’s just on stage for a minute, but the teaming is electric. The crowd goes wild.

*

Usher and Kanye West

Where: Staples Center, 1111 S. Figueroa St., L.A .

When: 7 p.m. Monday and 7 p.m. Thursday

Price: Sold out

Contact: (213) 742-7300

Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music

critic, can be reached at Robert.Hilburn@latimes.com.