Those two back-to-back hits meant that Usher held the #1 spot for an uninterrupted 19-week run, the longest in history at that point. Ultimately, though, “Burn” blew up almost as big as “Yeah!,” and it replaced “Yeah!” at the top of the charts. Usher had wanted to release “Burn” as the album’s first single, but “Yeah!” caught on too fast. “Yeah!” got the world’s attention, but “Burn,” the second single from Confessions, gave a better idea of what Usher was trying to do. Most of Confessions is lush, expertly crafted R&B about byzantine romantic travails. That narrative turned out to be compellingly messy, and the compelling mess worked as well to sell records in 2004 as it did in 1977. They wanted to make art that would build on the image of Usher that already existed out in the world, and they wanted to get people invested in Usher’s personal narrative. For most of Confessions, though, Usher and his collaborators were chasing something else. In the context of Confessions, “Yeah!” was a glorious anomaly, an anthemic hookfest that felt bigger than any one person. But even amidst all that doom and gloom, Usher’s Confessions emerged as a bona fide blockbuster, a four-quadrant monster.Įarlier this week, writing about Usher’s insanely dominant club klaxon “ Yeah!,” I called Confessions “a Thriller for the post-Napster era.” But the better comparison might be Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, the messiest all-conquering smash of the ’70s. Young people just weren’t buying music anymore. The iTunes Music Store hadn’t yet emerged as a money-maker, and label people were mad that they had to do business according to Steve Jobs’ terms, selling all of their songs for only a dollar apiece. The labels and their lawyers had managed to put Napster out of business, but tons of other file-sharing services were popping up to fill that hole. The industry was a few years past the peak of the CD-sales boom.
In 2004, the music business was in trouble. I can imagine record-label bean-counters looking back on Usher’s 2004 and softly weeping, pining for the days that they can’t have back. For that one year, Usher was putting up numbers. But nothing in the man’s career, before or since, can measure up to what Usher did in 2004, the year that he truly owned the pop charts. That happened just a couple of months ago, when a moment of beautifully hammy showmanship from a Tiny Desk Concert reached meme status. Usher might not reliably chart the way that he once did, but he can still become a viral sensation out of nowhere.
Usher Raymond was a star long before 2004, and he remained a star for years after. Police had rejected similar protest applications recently, but courts then ruled that they should be allowed on freedom of expression grounds.In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Plans to burn copies of the Quran have sparked riots in Sweden in recent months. Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the Quran burning was "legal but not appropriate". Saudi Arabia - the destination of around 1.8m worshippers on the annual Hajj pilgrimage this week - said "these hateful and repeated acts cannot be accepted with any justification." Iran echoed Iraq's criticism, calling the act of burning the Quran "provocative" and "unacceptable", while Egypt described it as a "shameful" act which was especially provocative as Muslims mark Eid al-Adha. Iraq said the incident was "a reflection of a hateful aggressive spirit that has nothing to do with freedom of expression." Morocco and Jordan have recalled their ambassadors to Stockholm, and Morocco has also summoned Sweden's charge d'affaires in Rabat. Middle Eastern nations including Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt strongly criticised the burning. Police intervene as people react to a burning of a copy of the Quran in Stockholm on Wednesday
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