Music mogul L.A Reid sent a teenage Usher to live with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs despite admitting to fears he was being “irresponsible”.
He had signed Usher to his label LaFace Records in 1993, when the singer was 14-years-old. They soon released his first single – Call Me a Mack – but Reid struggled to find another track for him. He admitted he couldn’t find a song “compelling enough to release” after Usher’s debut.
Reid wanted him to be “edgy” and so called on his friend P. Diddy, who he called Puffy, for help. Writing in his 2016 memoir, Reid recalled asking: “Will you take this kid and teach him your swagger? Can you just give him some of your flavor?” Reid, who is being sued for sexual assault and harassment by a former colleague that he denies, sent Usher to New York for a ‘Puffy Flavour Camp’.
Usher has admitted he was exposed to “pretty wild” stuff while living with Diddy, that he “didn’t necessarily understand”. He also revealed he would not allow the same thing to happen to his own children. Diddy is facing charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.
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He has refuted the charges against him and repeatedly pled his innocence. His trial starts in May next year. Diddy’s relationship with Usher has come under scrutiny amid the allegations. Reid recalled in his memoir how he met Diddy in the same year he signed Usher. He was “knocked out” by his musical talent that he introduced Diddy to Clive Davis to ensure he had everything he needed to create Bad Boy Records.
In his book Sing To Me: My Story Of Making Music, Finding Magic And Searching For Who’s Next, Reid said: “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. I would never be sure flavor camp worked until he came back.” Usher recalled his experiences with Diddy while appearing on The Howard Stern Show in 2016, as he said: “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.” Asked if he would ever send his own children to ‘Puffy Flavor Camp,’ he responded: “Hell no!” Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2004, Usher claimed Diddy introduced him to “a totally different set of s**t — sex, specifically.”
After a year long ‘Puffy Flavour Camp,’ Diddy met with Reid to play Usher’s album. “Puffy walked in without a shirt like the king of the world, popped a cassette into my stereo, pressed play, and started dancing all over the room as soon as the music began,” Reid wrote. “Puffy had done exactly what I wanted him to do for Usher. He gave this little kid a hip-hop-infused R&B sound full of bad boy swagger.”
