15 years later, Johnson County teens’ orchestra video lands spot in Usher’s Super Bowl ad

An Apple Music promo of Usher’s Super Bowl halftime show includes a snippet of four Blue Valley Northwest students playing the artist’s biggest hit “Yeah!” more than 15 years ago.

Don’t blink. You might miss their big moment.

The promotion debuted a few days ago on social media and on CBS, which will air Super Bowl LVIII Feb. 11 from Las Vegas. It features various people — a church choir, a flute player in a subway, a marching band — paying homage to “Yeah!”

“The first look at what Usher has in store came via a one-minute hype video taking viewers on a kaleidoscopic trip through 30 years of Ush,” Billboard proclaimed.

The Johnson County teens pop up for two seconds at the 33-second mark.

They are adults now, scattered across the country but still friends.

How that moment all those years ago in an Overland Park living room came to Apple Music’s attention last year still has quartet member and viola player Maggie Alexander thinking, “That’s wild.”

Here’s the backstory.

She and her friends formed a string quartet in orchestra class at Northwest in 2008. Every year students were required to arrange a song for quartet and perform it for their classmates.

Cello player Nathan Hoffmann, then a junior, used composition software to turn “Yeah!” into an orchestral piece.

Featuring Ludacris and Lil Jon, the song is arguably Usher’s most famous. In February 2004 it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for 12 consecutive weeks, the most-played song of the year.

Hoffmann, now 33, doesn’t remember exactly why he chose to reinterpret that song, thinking it must still have been “everywhere” at the time.

“Yeah!” is more hip-hop and R&B than Beethoven, after all. Though Hoffmann thought some of the sliding high notes “would work well for violins.”

“I thought it would be fun,” said Hoffmann, who is studying for a Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA.

He gave it a percussive dance vibe, adding clapping and having the players tap on their instruments.

The group decided to share their version with more than just their classmates. They gathered at Hoffmann’s home, where his dad videotaped them performing. Hoffmann posted it to his YouTube channel, ManOfTheHoff, where it has been viewed nearly 8,000 times since June 2008.

In late December, right before Christmas, Hoffmann received what he described as a rather cryptic email from a woman who said she was with a production company. She included a link to his YouTube video and said “a major streaming service or something” was interested in using it, he said.

“It was totally unexpected,” Hoffmann said.

Oh, and the project was hush-hush. Everyone would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. She didn’t mention Apple Music’s involvement at first, Hoffmann said.

He contacted the others in the quartet who stay in touch through a WhatsApp group chat.

“When he sent us that email I think the majority of us thought, ‘This is a scam,’” said Alexander, who lives in suburban Kansas City. “Because it was really weird. All they said basically was, ‘We would like to use your clip.’

“We didn’t know that it was the Super Bowl until after we had to sign an NDA.”

The promotions folks “said they were talking to maybe a dozen video creators trying to show Usher’s cultural impact, especially of this song,” Hoffmann said. “There are a lot of videos of amateurs playing this song, a flute player, people dancing in their kitchen.

“They were looking for videos that were not made for clicks, just people having fun with the music. And then they said it was going to be a national promotion for Usher’s halftime show.”

The promoters didn’t promise the quartet would make the final cut, he said. “It just depended on edits and how they fit together.”

He said the quartet didn’t find out until two days before the first promotions aired that they were included.

The Super Bowl is historically one of the most-watched TV broadcasts every year. Last year a record 115.1 million viewers watched the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the Philadelphia Eagles.

To think that thousands now might see him and his friends as their young selves, jamming to Usher, even for a blink of an eye?

“It’s pretty amazing,” Hoffmann said. “I never imagined when I was arranging this for fun for orchestra class that anyone would see it other than orchestra class.”

Editor’s note: Nathan Hoffmann’s mother works for The Kansas City Star.