LA Reid attributes Justin Bieber’s success to him being ‘beautiful like a woman’

Record producer signed singer when he was 14

Record producer LA Reid has said that he first signed Justin Bieber up for a record deal because he was “beautiful, like a woman”.

Reid – who has worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Kanye West – signed Bieber to Island Records in October 2008, when the singer was just 14 years old.

The music mogul was introduced to Bieber by Usher. He describes first meeting the future star in his new memoir Sing To Me.

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“At four on the dot, Usher walked into my office with this adorable fourteen-year-old boy,” Reid writes, as reported by Huffington Post.

“This kid was beautiful, like a woman can be beautiful and men rarely are, and he turned it on as soon as he stepped into the room.”

“I could see immediately that Justin’s hair would be every bit as important as his songs, his voice his face, or his presence. Justin was simply beautiful – his superpower was his face”.

LA Reid also claims in his book that Michael Jackson used to laugh at videos of Prince making mistakes.

Reid describes Jackson showing him footage of a 1983 James Brown concert where both himself and Prince joined the star onstage.

The passage reads: “Prince [couldn’t] make his guitar work, frantically stripping off his shirt and trying tricks with the microphone stand and making all these poses. After Michael’s dazzling star turn, Prince fell as flat as he could, and Michael enjoyed laughing at the video.”

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Reid says that Jackson then showed him another video of Prince. “After that, he put on a scene from Prince’s movie Under The Cherry Moon, the artsy black-and-white bomb he made after ‘Purple Rain’ and he laughed some more at Prince.”

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