Do we like Usher?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long, clean career and a good political record, held back by defending Sean Combs and sharing a stage with Chris Brown.
Usher Raymond IV was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1978 and found his voice in the choir at St. Elmo's Missionary Baptist Church. He moved to Atlanta with his mum at about twelve, and a talent show performance got him signed to LaFace Records at fourteen.
The career arc is a long one: a gold debut in 1994, the multiplatinum My Way, then 8701 and the monster Confessions in 2004. He did a Broadway run in Chicago, kept filling Las Vegas rooms, and played the Super Bowl halftime show in 2024. Atlanta gave him its highest civic honour, the Phoenix Award, that same year.
On the harm test, the record is clean where it counts for us. We found no attacks on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet in his own words. In October 2024 he stood on stage at a Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta and urged early voting. He talked of the chance to choose “a new generation of leadership for our country”.
The stain is Sean Combs. In a March 2026 Forbes interview, Usher said he had nothing negative to say about his former mentor, who was convicted in 2025 on two prostitution-related federal charges and is serving a prison sentence. He called him “legacy”. Plenty of fans said that sat badly with a jury's verdict, and where you land depends on whether you read it as loyalty to a mentor or as going soft on a conviction.
Then there's the tour. Usher's joint stadium run with Chris Brown, announced in April, drew backlash over Brown's legal history, including the Rihanna case that ended in a guilty plea. Brown hit back at critics online. The Daily News report didn't say Usher had responded. It's one project, and the company rather than Usher's words, which is why this is an asterisk and not a lean no.
On the good-person side, the long-run picture is of a working musician who has stayed in the game for three decades and kept his name out of ugly stoushes. Honestly, the sources we could open were thin on charity, so we aren't going to pad that out here. He founded the youth group Usher's New Look back in 1999, but we couldn't open a dated page to cite for it.