“Every night I walk out and I’m present before I walk on the stage,” Usher says the next day at his house. Come on: It’s Usher.” Sure, there was that late-aughts ebb, but now there’s just so much flow. “So she’ll think I’m cool.”) Vogue’s photographer Campbell Addy says he knows every Usher song: “I used to buy the CDs and just study the lyrics in the liner notes. She saved the accompanying note for her scrapbook and planned to show it to her daughter, Dylan, back home in LA. “What a gentleman, truly a rarity,” she said. Murphy, aglow, fans herself after the shoot: “I have the best job in the world.” (Later, Murphy carried the fire-hydrant-size arrangement of hydrangeas Usher had delivered to her dressing room with her to dinner. “You should have a spotlight every day of your life!” he shouts as Usher serenades model Carolyn Murphy for Vogue. Usher’s longtime barber Shawn “Shizz” Porter refers to Usher’s stage presence with words like ordained. “I’ve been really lucky in my life to have met incredible artists, but Usher is definitely one of my favorites to work with, because he’s so nice.” “Usher is just so humble and so kind and so generous,” Rousteing tells me. (He was a perfect date, she tells me on a call from London, and let her control the radio.) Or Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, who designed Usher’s wardrobe for the first stretch of his Vegas residency. There are designers, too, like Bianca Saunders, who attended the 2023 Met Gala with him, driving through the streets of New York in the matte-black 1960s Cadillac convertible he imported to the city for this purpose. (That dip, by the way, has ultimately made people love him more: how did we forget about Usher?!) It’s the people who work with him every day who make you feel how much he is loved-his manager and bodyguard and assistants who sit you down and tell you what a good guy he is the Dolby theater ushers who work the show three nights a week, joyfully singing along to all of the songs the other R&B superstars who turned up as surprise acts (Nas, Jermaine Dupri, Teyana Taylor, Keyshia Cole, Anita Baker) the boldface names who turned up just to turn up (LeBron James, Zendaya and Tom Holland, various Kardashians, Jennifer Lopez, Doja Cat, Issa Rae, Keke Palmer). Usher has dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool fans-though not quite enough of them to save him from a mid-career dip in the late aughts, around the time his fifth album underperformed and it felt like music en masse was moving away from his brand of R&B. And plenty of them behave badly and retain deep banks of parasocial fan armies to rise to their defense. Sure, you’re probably thinking, lots of big stars are loved. Not a soul alive wants to see Usher fall. He knelt and fixed it, crooning with the same grin as before. (He allowed it for a few bars with a kind “okaaay,” before gently removing himself.) Seven months later, at a show in October, a few songs after one audience member leapt into the aisle in an attempt to grind (another kind “okaaay”), a woman in the front row alerted him, nursery-school-teacher-style, that one of his shoes had come untied. When I attended the show in March, during one of Usher’s crowd-work sections, a demure-looking audience member attached herself to Usher’s chest, seat-belt-style, from behind, locking her hands across his sternum until her eyeglasses got misty. Everyone wants to love him down, but they also want to love him up. At his Vegas shows, the energy inside the (typically 85 percent female) audience is probably best described as affectionately feral. I mean in the larger sense-the global sense. I don’t even mean just at home, though his partner of four years, Jenn Goicoechea, and their two children, Sire and Sovereign, as well as his Atlanta-based teenage sons from a prior marriage, Usher “Cinco” V and Naviyd Ely, certainly have that covered. And I don’t just mean in his music, though love is more often than not its subject. You have never met someone so loved as Usher.
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