At first listen, Usher’s Boyfriend would seem to be yet another in a long line of steal-your-girl songs from R&B’s king saboteur. “Somebody said that your boyfriend’s looking for me,” the song starts. “Oh, that’s cool / Well, he should know I’m pretty easy to find / Just look for me wherever he sees you.”
The music video has Keke Palmer, the child singer turned Nickelodeon star turned Good Morning America host turned Nope lead, on a girls’ trip to Usher’s buzzy Las Vegas residency. The video ends with a still-in-bed Palmer realizing it was all a dream and disappointed in herself for sleeping through the Usher show. “Shit, I’m so tired,” she sighs. “You know, I’m a mother. After all.”
And with that winking punchline, Palmer dots the exclamation point on one mother of a revenge song – a middle finger to the haters who have been raking her over the coals all summer for taking a few hours off from being a mom.
As revenge songs go, Fleetwood Mac’s Silver Spring is more smash-mouth, Beyoncé’s Becky with the Good Hair more explicit, Miley Cyrus’s I Can Buy Myself Flowers more personal. But where those hits all spoke to the pain of the singers themselves, Boyfriend has Usher speaking on behalf of Palmer. It’d be a weird set-up if relationship tampering weren’t already a dominant theme of the singer’s work.
Last Tuesday, Palmer posted a teaser for Boyfriend to her Instagram, and Jennifer Lopez – with whom she co-starred in the hit 2019 film Hustlers – immediately endorsed it as “savage”. The video was released two days later and has already racked up more than 3.9m views on YouTube. The numbers are as much a testament to Palmer’s America’s-sweetheart status as Usher’s everlasting appeal.
Boyfriend takes inspiration from the actual trip Palmer, 29, took to see Usher’s Vegas residency this summer, months after giving birth to her first child. When she shared videos of her night on social media, –the clips of Usher serenading Palmer on stage that went viral. Her fashion choice for that night, a sheer black gown that left Palmer’s thonged backside exposed, became a target for sharp criticism from online rubberneckers, the harshest barb coming from inside her own house. “It’s the outfit tho,” tweeted Darius Jackson, Palmer’s partner and father to their infant son. “You a mom.”
The charged remark touched off a chaotic online debate over family values and respectability politics. “Because of the sexual perversion of society [we’ve] become more and more desensitized to decency,” reasoned Tony Gaskins, the relationship expert for MTV’s Couple’s Retreat.
“Men never have their fatherhood weaponized when having fun,” wrote the journalist Ernest Owens. “The sexism jumped right out.”
The chatter had Jackson – a college football player turned aspiring actor and model – digging deeper. “We live in a generation where a man of the family doesn’t want the wife & mother to his kids to showcase booty cheeks to please others & he gets told how much of a hater he is,” he wrote in a follow-up post. “This is my family & my reputation. I have standards & morals to what I believe. I rest my case.” And that pat stance was all the invitation commenters needed to dredge up old posts denigrating a topless photo of Tracee Ellis Ross, justifying the police killing of Alton Sterling and making other offensive claims that have since been deleted..
From the start of his Vegas residency last summer, Usher has made a spectacle of spotlighting Taraji P Henson, Issa Rae, Kim Kardashian and scores of other celebrity guests. Only Palmer has been criticized for swooning over the singer’s performance of There Goes My Baby, entirely because her very own boyfriend was the one making it A Thing. Mind you, this is the same mom-shamer who enthusiastically posted scantily clad photos of Palmer post-pregnancy glow-up in the recent past.
For his part, Usher sums up his moment in Vegas with Palmer in Vegas as good, clean fun – but that hasn’t stopped fans from labeling him a “domestic terrorist” for stealing so many hearts.
Since Palmer went viral in Vegas, the status of her relationship with Jackson has been unclear – leaving social media sleuths to draw their own conclusions from mutual unfollows, deleted posts and conflicting gossip stories. While Palmer has remained outspoken about feeling more sexually empowered since becoming a mother and said her main loyalties were to her baby and her career, she’s also cashed in on the criticism, selling caps and T-shirts branded with the phrase “I’m a Motha”. In this Usher collaboration, however, Palmer doesn’t just appear to kiss off the relationship for good. She does so via exactly the nightmare scenario her man feared in the first place.
After peaking in the Rat Pack era, a Vegas residency was thought to be an artist’s closing act – one last cash grab before all cachet is forever lost. But Usher has bucked the trend of contemporaries like Britney Spears and Celine Dion by making himself more relevant with every show – and a just-announced closing call beginning in October has triggered a run on tickets. Where another act only has a catalog of past hits to draw from, Usher has released a number of singles and features his fans want to hear as much as classics like U Remind Me and Yeah!
Boyfriend follows that request-making tradition, but Palmer’s presence elevates it. Here finally is an anthem for the woman who believes motherhood shouldn’t be a social death sentence or swallow her entire personality or come at the expense of her bodily autonomy. Palmer deserves extra credit for laughing at herself and getting the last laugh, too.
