• November 13, 2000
• Vol. 54
• No. 20

Tyrese: Sexiest R&B Star

Can we please just bottle him? Since being discovered in a 1995 TV commercial singing about Coca-Cola, Tyrese has become as ubiquitous as the real thing. He's a platinum-selling recording artist, host of MTV's Jaws Countdown and the first male model under exclusive contract to Guess? jeans. At 6'1" and rock-hard from marathon workouts, the man behind the '99 hit "Sweet Lady" (his second CD, 2000 Watts, comes out next spring) doesn't lack for effervescence. Says Tyrese (last name: Gibson), 21: "I've always been the in-your-face, nothing-to-hide kind of guy." He's also a great-to-look-at kind of guy, says his pal, MTV veejay Ananda Lewis, who is fond of his "bald head" (which he's been shaving since age 16) and "12-pack" abs. "But more than anything, I think the way he takes care of his mom is really sexy." In May, the singer bought his mother, Priscilla Murray, 42, a house in California's Riverside County, moving her from the poverty-ridden L.A. section of Watts, where she raised Tyrese and his three older siblings on her own. As a kid, Tyrese says he threw himself into football, basketball and track to avoid the drugs and gangs in his neighborhood. "Everything I could do to stay out of harm's way, I did," he says. He also found refuge in singing. "He turned a negative energy around to a positive," says Reggie Andrews, his music teacher at Locke High School, where he was voted most talented and class clown. Now the owner of three L.A.-area houses, this bachelor admits that "girls always tell me about my muscles. But if I let people in on the way I eat they'd be shocked. You know those little caramel-and-chocolate turtles? I kill them."