Like so many southern kids with good voices born in the mid-seventies, Usher Terrence Raymond IV (Dallas, 45 years old) started singing in a choir.
But few, very few, of those parish boys manage to make a career in music.
And even less what Usher, now without first name, surname or subsequent number, will do this Sunday: perform part of his 30-year musical career at the intermission of the Super Bowl, the most watched sports show on the planet, in a stadium in Las Vegas with 70,000 attendees and more than 100 million viewers from around the world.
It is not that Jonetta Patton, the singer's mother, intended for him to become a gospel wonder, but she did see from very early on that he had an outstanding voice, skills for the stage and a personality that imposed itself.
Hence, at six years old, she pushed him to sing with the members of the church choir in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she raised the boy alone after divorcing her alcoholic husband, when Usher was barely a year old and she was only 22. Shortly after, she She remarried, had another son, James Lackey, and divorced again, raising them both.
Hence, upon seeing Usher's talent, she bet on him and did not hesitate to do everything necessary for his triumph, which was everyone's triumph.
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His nose was not wrong, as a dozen number one hits, 80 million records sold, eight Grammy Awards, films, musicals, tours and residencies have demonstrated over three decades (he has been giving concerts in Las Vegas for two and a half years , where it has moved to an even larger facility).
Usher is one of the great products of the mid-2000s, when he released his most successful albums, but he has managed to continue staying in the public eye — and amass a fortune of, it is estimated, about 180 million dollars (about 167 million euros )—without giving too much to talk about, without the scandals that plague other R&B stars, especially from those decades, as is the case of his musical godfather, Puff Daddy (Sean Combs, also known as Diddy), with multiple lawsuits for harassment sexual.
Usher and his mother Jonetta Patton in Chicago, Illinois, in December 1994. Raymond Boyd (Getty Images)
For a star, he has built a career with a certain discretion.
In fact, he himself says that the worst moment of his life was very early in his life.
After the church and children's television shows came another rite of passage: bands.
Usher decided to rename himself Cha-Cha and join the quintet NuBeginning.
And he was so successful that Jonetta packed her bags and left 200 kilometers away: “My mother took me out of the band and we went to live in Atlanta, Georgia, and my career began.
I was about 11 or 12 years old and I had started winning talent contests, we had a recording contract, and therefore music, and I felt like I was being ripped away from my world,” the singer recalled in an interview last fall.
“No, honey, your world is just beginning, because you are a soloist and there is something incredible about you,” Patton replied.
“You are stealing my dreams,” he cried to his mother.
“No, I’m giving them to you.”
After attracting the attention of producers (who convinced him to leave Cha-Cha behind and return to being Usher), the worst came, the small big change that almost cut short his career: that of his voice.
Antonio
LA
Reid, the music businessman who signed him when he was 14, never wanted to turn him into a child star because he knew he could go further.
But when he changed his voice, just as he was preparing his debut album, he admits that he wanted to quit, as he told
The Hollywood Reporter
.
“I wanted to break my contract with him.
He would break her heart, he would break his mother's heart.
It was a very hard period of our lives.
And then someone told me: 'Don't be stupid.
Do not sell your shares in Usher.
He is going to be a star.”
That was Puff Daddy, who took him to live with him in New York for a while and made him record his debut album in 1994. But for 17 years his mother continued to manage his career with an iron fist, and she herself has made a fortune of around two million dollars.
At that time, Usher met Chilli, vocalist of the then famous girl band TLC.
They had an on-and-off relationship for years, and also a long friendship, and when they didn't have a partner they got back together, as she recently said.
They were together for three years, from 2001 to 2004. Later, in addition to dating some models, including Naomi Campbell, he began a relationship with his stylist, Tameka Foster, with whom he was married between 2007 and 2009 and had two children (Usher V,
Five
; and Naviyd, who are already 16 and 15 years old).
She brought to the marriage the three that she had from a previous relationship and that he considered as his, among them the youngest, Kile, who died in 2012, aged 11, after being hit by a jet ski in a lake, and who is remembered frequently.
After their separation, Usher began dating his agent, Grace Miguel.
Their relationship began in 2009 and they married in Cuba in 2015 until breaking up in 2018, without children.
It was around then that three people sued him for having given them a sexually transmitted disease, herpes, without warning them.
For five years now, his partner has been Epic Records executive Jennifer Goicoechea, with whom he had his first daughter, Sovereign Bo, in September 2020 and his second, Sire Castrello, just a year later.
A young Usher, barely 15 years old, recording the song 'U Will Know' with Black Men United (a great group of African-American singers), in July 1994 in New York. Al Pereira (Getty Images)
Now it is 20 years since his main success, thanks to what was his fourth album,
Confessions
, of which he placed more than 20 million copies on the market and with which he achieved all his Grammy nominations.
There he already clearly found his image and aesthetics (more situated in R&B than in rap; he is also a great fan of fashion), becoming a man with a voice and a way of acting that is very his own, particular, very consistent. with that air of the late nineties and early two thousand, with a sexy but caramel point through which she posed with languid looks and her torso in the air.
Since then he knew how to diversify his career.
Among others, he performed for four months in the musical
Chicago
on Broadway in 2006, and has had a residency in Las Vegas for the last three years (and now a tour of two dozen US cities awaits him).
But not everything has been music.
Thanks to her, he received an honorary degree from Berklee a few months ago.
She has donated money to Democratic campaigns, especially supporting the Obamas, as well as the black community.
She advocated for June 19, called
Juneteenth
, when the end of slavery is commemorated, to become a national holiday in the United States, as it ended up being.
He has also opted, of course, to invest in perfumes and restaurants, as well as
catering
services , urban skating rinks, participations in music businesses such as the Tidal platform and even basketball teams: he is financially involved in the Cleveland Cavaliers of Ohio and wants to do so. in American football.
And, furthermore, she was one of the discoverers to bet on a little boy who played the guitar funny on YouTube: Justin Bieber.
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Both Bieber and his
manager
, the down-and-out Scooter Braun, are good friends of the artist.
Kim Kardashian, who was one of those who made the official announcement that Usher was chosen for the Super Bowl, is another of his great followers, so much so that she has just made him the image of her men's underwear campaign, where he poses with $18 underwear and $200,000 jewelry.
So is Jeff Bezos, on whose yacht he spent a few days last August sailing along the Croatian coast with Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry, whom, he said, he asked for advice for this Super Bowl (in which, by the way, the artists do not see a single dollar; the football league covers all expenses and travel, but does not give them direct financial compensation).
It is possible that many of them will be in the stands, especially when the league final is being held in Las Vegas, the epicenter of show business.
He will share the spotlight with the San Francisco 49ers and the Missouri Kansas City Chiefs, as well as with superstar Taylor Swift, present at the stadium to see her partner, player Travis Kelce, and with whom he will surely compete for media attention.
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More than nervous, Usher is eager to perform, so much so that he has managed to scratch minutes at intermission and not only have 13, but 15, in what will be, as he revealed on
Good Morning America
, a great tribute to black American artists.
“I'm more than ready.
I just want to sing louder than ever, dance more intensely than ever,” he said this week in an interview with
Billboard
.
Little is known about the intermission: a change of clothes, a guest artist, some skating, a song from his new album, his first in eight years,
Coming Home,
which came out of the oven on Friday produced by his own record company. .
“I want to celebrate 30 years of a career in which I feel very fortunate to have been able to create songs and moments that people will always remember,” he said.
“What an incredible
crescendo
.
“I’ve done 100
shows
in Las Vegas and the 101st will be the Super Bowl.”
His mother has also spoken of the “pride” he feels: “I thank God for so many blessings,” he said on television.
On the same stage that Michael Jackson has passed through (for him, the most important artist when it comes to modernizing that show), Beyoncé, Rihanna, Eminem, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Coldplay, he will think of all those who have accompanied him in the path: “I didn't start where I am now, and I didn't get there alone.
So I take everyone who has been part of this with me.”
Also to Loretta, who will be in the stands supporting him.