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Usher was sent to live with ‘wildest party guy’ P Diddy at 14 ‘to make him edgier’

Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs acted as a mentor to Usher after the Yeah! hitmaker was signed to L.A. Reid’s record label LaFace Records when he was just 14-years-old

Usher was sent to live with P Diddy when he was just 14-years-old, despite the rapper having a reputation for being “the wildest party guy in the country”.

Record producer L.A. Reid signed Usher to his LaFace Records label immediately after seeing him audition and the young star quickly released his first tune, Call Me a Mack. However, things started to stall after the debut single.

Reid said in his memoir, Sing To Me: My Story Of Making Music, Finding Magic And Searching For Who’s Next, that he couldn’t find another song which was “compelling enough to release.” And so he turned to his pal Diddy for help. It was decided Usher would be sent to live with the hip-hop mogul to make him more “edgy.”

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Diddy was asked to teach Usher his “swagger,” with Reid also recalling asking the Bad Boys CEO: “Can you just give him some of your flavor?”

Reid wasn’t worried about sending Usher to live with Diddy, as he wrote: “Usher was fifteen years old, but nothing about him ever seemed juvenile.”
“I was turning him over to the wildest party guy in the country at an age when I still needed to get his mother’s permission, but he went to New York for almost a year. I didn’t know whether I was being irresponsible or having an epiphany.”

Usher has since spoken out about his time living with Diddy and admitted he saw some “pretty wild” things. During an appearance on The Howard Stern Show, he explained: “I got a chance to see some things … I don’t know if I could indulge and even understand what I was looking at.”

“It was pretty wild. It was crazy. There were very curious things taking place and I didn’t necessarily understand it.” Usher was then asked if he would send his own children to have the experience he did to which he responded: “Hell no!”

Usher also told Rolling Stone Diddy had introduced him to “a totally different set of s— — sex, specifically.” He noted: “There was always girls around. You’d open a door and see somebody doing it, or several people in a room having an orgy. You never knew what was going to happen.”

Usher’s relationship with Diddy came under scrutiny after the All About The Benjamins singer was arrested last month and charged with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, transportation to engage in prostitution. Combs has denied all allegations against him and has pleaded not guilty.