LEARNING THE ART OF SEDUCTION FROM THE KING OF HÖRNINESS

There are two things that make women happy,” Usher Raymond IV tells me.

- JAZMINE HUGHES

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.