Usher and Chris Brown’s Audacious Joint Tour

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.