Usher’s Art of Seduction

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There are two things that make women happy,” Usher Raymond IV tells me. He is neither overconfident or condescending about this; he is just sharing industry secrets, the knowledge with which he’s been able to build his 30-year career. The first is undivided attention. “Onstage, if you’re willing to come from the audience and speak to one woman, the entire room is living vicariously through her,” he says.

His approach springs from the fundamentals of the good ol’ days of R&B, when a man would put on a freshly pressed suit and run a hot comb through his hair before he dared sing to a lady. It’s a trick young Usher picked up from watching The Five Heartbeats, the 1991 Robert Townsend movie loosely based on the rise and fall of the Temptations. The audience of heaving chests and hungry eyes made the musician want to try it for himself. “It worked,” he says, his eyes twinkling like sunlight on seawater.

Not everyone can pluck up a woman and make her feel, in front of thousands of other people, like she’s the most fragrant flower in the bunch. “That’s just to be a crooner and to be a person who could seduce a girl with your voice,” Usher admits. Which brings us to the second thing that pleases a woman: physical touch. Anybody can brush a hand, leave an impression, transfer some good energy. Touch is an essential element of the R&B formula for seduction, as sensuous and forthright as the music itself. It proves the genre’s inherent hypothesis that sometimes the possibility of pleasure is enough to drive you wild. Massages, Usher says, are a welcome display of his love language (he’s “not great” at giving them, though he loves to receive). But the quickest path to romance, for Usher, is simply holding hands. To prove this, he takes my tiny doll hand in his own enormous one (“I have the hands of somebody six feet tall!” he jokes — spoken like a man who is not). For just a second, the heat between our bodies is all I can feel.

I am, in front of anyone else, a lesbian, but it’s 85 degrees and we’re in Atlanta and I’m in front of Usher. Even as a sheltered preteen, I knew Usher had something to do with sex, basically from the moment he walked through Moesha’s door. Sitting with him in person two decades later is a doozy. We’re in Live Nation’s offices, and he is wearing an all-black sweat suit with white lines running down his shoulders and a cashew-size diamond earring nestled in his ear like a baby cradled in an arm. It’s the sort of hang that only a superstar could call a date: a woman, a man, and that man’s publicist. For ambience, a gardenia candle burns slowly between us. I immediately start yammering about his Las Vegas residency, which I had seen this past November: Watching you roller-skate around that stage made me so paralyzingly horny that all I could do was cry. While I talk, it feels as though he’s trying to hold my gaze for eternity. He takes the compliment graciously, his chrome grill making up his smile. I watch him stroke his beard and lick his lips, all on the same mischievous, damn-near-unchanged face. Our flirting summit happens during a short-lived dip of downtime for the musician, between wrapping up the Vegas residency (100 sold-out shows plus a quick stint in Paris), becoming the first independent artist to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show (which brought in a record 123 million viewers), and kicking off his world tour.

Even though he has always been around, doesn’t it feel as if Usher is back in a big way? We know the story: 2004’s Confessions is one of the biggest-selling R&B albums of all time, but his subsequent efforts, while successful, didn’t steam us up the same way. R&B tastes changed, putting a new generation of women front and center; Usher, meanwhile, started to appear on The Voice in a judge’s chair. But the reports from 2021’s Usher: The Las Vegas Residency and 2022’s Usher: My Way — The Vegas Residency, where his onstage serenades were endangering other people’s relationships, reminded us of the playful, rascally demeanor that went along with that silk sheet of a voice. Momentum built: His 2022 NPR “Tiny Desk” concert went viral, his Vegas residency became the hottest ticket in town, and he was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer, releasing his latest album, Coming Home, two days before the game. “Usher probably has the best male R&B catalogue of modern-day music, and it’s aged better than any of the R&B artists’ in history,” says producer Jermaine Dupri, who has worked with the singer for more than 25 years, including on Confessions. He compares Usher’s magnum opus to Thriller and Purple Rain, both in scope and longevity: “As R&B comes back, his music is still at the forefront.”

Usher talks about seduction like it’s an act of service, the equivalent of a friend sending you a surprise bottle of wine after a hard week: I just figured you could use this, even though you didn’t ask. “I say things that I think women would want to hear, that would make them feel good, seen, beautiful, as though a man is caring for this woman,” he says. Face-to-face — just as when he’s bumping and grinding and skating onstage — he is both smooth and earnest. When he tells me he prays every day, I realize that my favorite part of any recent Usher show has been when the horny makes way for the holy, and after an evening of filth, the musician shouts out his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. God showed up in his Super Bowl performance before Alicia Keys did. After Usher finished singing “U Don’t Have to Call,” he broke into a direct-to-viewer address, his stage version of an album interlude: “But if you do call, know that God answers prayers.” R&B and religion can prompt you into the same position; whether you’re pleading or praying, you’re on your knees.

Usher’s offering, then, is not just a performance but a way of making a woman feel the way she deserves to feel. In his eyes, this is what sets him apart from other artists. “I don’t know if I’m intentionally doing it or I’m trying to remedy something,” he says. Either way, he knows that he’s got the magic touch, that he “could supply this thing in that moment to make you feel something.” Part of that is recognizing the power of his voice and how to use it. “When you sing in falsetto” — he pronounces this fa-setto, the Atlanta jumping out — “it just does something different to women,” he says.

What exactly can singing in a higher-than-usual vocal range do to women? “You tell me!” Usher says, grinning in a way that makes me go dumb. His dimples are so deep I could eat ice cream out of them. I feel myself start to slide down the Kinsey scale. If I want proof, he says, I don’t have to look any further than our conversation: “You started this interview by telling me how I made you feel.”

When Usher was a little boy, he’d spend Sunday mornings sitting in his grandma’s lap, caressing her face right there in the church pew, taken at how he could hold beauty in his hands. When he was 14, auditioning for record producer L.A. Reid, he sealed his contract by serenading the women in Reid’s office, taking them by the hand and looking directly into their eyes. “I think women are beautiful, and I think that they need to be reminded because, at times, the world might not necessarily give them the recognition and love and nurturing that they need — in a way only I can,” he says.

He credits his first girlfriend — “My first love, her name was Karon Vereen,” daughter of Ben — with introducing him to the finer things in life. They dated when they were around 15, after Reid sent the singer to live in New York for a time. “I knew nothing about jazz, the theatrical world, exhibitions, art — any of that shit. I was like a fish out of water,” Usher says. He was always a confident dancer: As a child, he studied his elder cousins, copied Bobby Brown, and watched movies like the break-dancing encyclopedia Beat Street.

A Michael Jackson devotee from a young age, Usher was already familiar with Fred Astaire — Jackson had mentioned him in interviews — who was a significant inspiration. But Vereen taught him about Bob Fosse (“Oh, this that shit right here!” Usher says of his first time seeing Fosse’s choreography) and, crucially, Gene Kelly. (Kelly obviously gets major R&B points for all that singing he did in the rain.) For a young Usher, he was a whole package: He had the voice; he had charm by the bucketful. And just when Kelly couldn’t get any better, a bow on top: “And then,” Usher recounts, “when I seen him skate?!”

When Kelly skates around singing “I Like Myself” in the 1955 musical It’s Always Fair Weather, he is sort of a proto-Usher — irresistible and debonair, hat cocked to the side, wearing a grin that feels tailor-made for you. He’s gliding around town, crooning about how a woman’s affections have changed him for the better. Kelly is a lot more family friendly than Usher, the embodiment of “Aw, shucks,” but you start to see where Usher gets it from. The showmanship, the suaveness, the smile. A heartthrob has to borrow some of the qualities of an Everyman; every woman has to want him, has to be able to see herself with him, has to hear his voice and know that it’s meant for her. Being in the audience at one of his shows, a droplet in a wave, can make a woman feel like an object of desire without necessarily being objectified.

This concept — “Make women happy” — has turned Usher into one of the best-selling artists of his genre. Early on, the singer caught some flak: Did people really want to hear a teenager sing about making love so believably? But now that he’s a father, he appreciates that honesty, of singing about what he knew, even more. “I try to coddle my kids to protect them from emotions and life and love and sex — you can’t!” he says, laughing. “They want to experience things too. Why make them feel as though they need to hide it?” Instead, he uses his experiences — and his songs — to bond with his kids. Fall in love with someone and it’s not working out? Trapped in a relationship that’s gone on for too long? Laying down tracks in the studio and find out that your side chick has gotten pregnant and decided to keep the baby? “One of the greatest gifts I could ever give to one of my children is to be able to tell them, ‘I know exactly what you’re feeling right now. Listen to this song,’ ” Usher says. Not only does it remedy the pain, but it can bring them closer together.

Our date was scheduled a little after Father’s Day, on which each of his four children had presented him with a portrait of their dad. He hung them all up next to his Romare Bearden paintings. “My house is like a mini art gallery, and my kids are the features,” he says. After his Super Bowl performance, he married his longtime girlfriend, Jennifer Goicoechea, with whom he has two children: 2-year-old Sire and 3-year-old Sovereign (16-year-old Usher V, who goes by Cinco, and 15-year-old Naviyd are his children with his ex-wife Tameka Foster). When he first became a father at 29, his megahit album, Confessions, was topping the charts, and he was still at the peak of his sex-symbolism. “I always wanted to have a bigger family. I wanted to have a lot of kids. I wanted to have a wife, you know? To try to figure out partnership in that way. But it’s a balance, being plural in thought,” he says. “You’re trying to figure out how to still have some personality in the midst of being of service to whatever it might be: being a husband, being a dad.”

Usher contests the idea that getting married might have turned down the heat on his stage approach so strongly that I’m worried I’ve offended him by asking. “I dedicated my life to performing for you and entertaining you. I’m not gonna just leave because I get married,” he says. By now, he’s wagging his finger in my face — our first fight! “If I want your time, your money, your access, your undivided attention, I want you to know that I see you, I feel you, I’m connecting with you in that moment. And this music has been able to connect us throughout all of these years. I fell in love with music before I fell in love.”

Seeing his show in November — in the third row, awash in Ush Bucks — was the closest I’m getting to Heaven. All it takes is just a few moments of listening to Usher talk, and suddenly it makes sense how cults are formed, how a personality can be so magnetic that you lose — or, rather, gleefully renounce — your own agency because this person so clearly knows what’s best for you. I would’ve given him anything he wanted, which was the point: All that he wanted was to make me feel that way.

“That experience is what an R&B show offers,” he says. “You’re giving this energy, right? I’m not just here because of an obligation — I don’t want to make you feel that. Nah, this is a moment that we have together. We just shared something incredible. I’m smiling with you; I’m actually, really giving you the energy that came with this song. I’m emotional, I’m crying, I have anxiety, I’ve got excitement — we’re actually together and living this grand moment. Celebrating the songs — lesbian or straight, I don’t think it makes a difference, to be honest.”

All that loving energy requires him to put himself first. He runs me through his daily self-care rituals: “Do you take 20 minutes for yourself in the morning to not do anything, to be quiet, and then allow your body to be set in your mind and intentions and set an intention for yourself? And then, at the end of the night, do you actually take time away from all the service that you do to others, to be serviced? How have you communicated to say, ‘No, I need you to check on me. I need you to make certain that I’m okay. Let me know that you love me’?” He knows how good this feels, just as much as he suspects that we won’t grant it to ourselves. So Usher provides. And it’s not like he’s a saint; you can understand what he gets out of it, too. Don’t we all want to make somebody scream our name?