“Yeah!” casts a long shadow, and the truth is I’d mostly forgotten its follow-up, the intended lead single for the Confessions LP before Lil Jon muscled it out the way. So “Burn” was a pleasant rediscovery: it’s hardly the genre-bursting, elbow-throwing riot of “Yeah!”, but it’s an impeccably constructed and executed example of what soulmen were doing well in 2004. The kind of record you want to call a “slice of R&B” and for once mean the cliche – a genre as a scrumptious, endless cake where any serving contains the delicious qualities of the whole.
In 2004, those qualities often involved sounding like R.Kelly. “Burn” was already one of the best imitations of Kelly’s free-roaming, casually hooky, story-led 00s style – now it’s a way to hear that template used without feeling repulsed. And if its best moments are often the most Kellyish – that soft, high “hoo hoo hoo” hook taking up a few contemplative beats before the pre-chorus climax – Usher and songwriter Jermaine Dupri make the style their own emotionally, putting over vulnerability and confusion in a way Kelly had no interest in doing.
“Burn” is a tangle of indecision, twisting and knotting around itself, the singer ending up scorched in the fires he started. Gorgeously smooth it may be, but it’s also an uncomfortably accurate sketching of the agonised second-guessing and self-doubt that can come with deciding to end a relationship, including the stabbing post-breakup conviction that you’ve made entirely the wrong choice. The meandering, sing-speak approach Usher is using is a perfect vehicle for this kind of interior focus, even as it’s simultaneously a great way to demonstrate his agility and precision as a singer.
But ultimately those two qualities rub against each other a little. “Burn” is both a maze of doubt and a brilliant singer speedrunning that maze. “Yeah!” worked so well because it made Usher sweat, putting Usher in a musical environment where his mellifluous seducer’s tone couldn’t do all the work. Where he had to sweat. “Burn” isn’t like that. Complications in Dupri’s personal life apparently inspired the song, but the backing he provides here is discreet and straightforward. “Burn” is mature, sensitive, finely turned – but sweatless.
Score: 7
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This is another of the select few that inevitably passed right by me at the time, and each time I’ve listened to ‘Burn’ since I think I’ve tended to quickly forget how it goes. And yet I still want to enjoy it more than I Don’t Wanna Know and to some degree I recognise its status in Usher’s career. Clover Hope’s p4k Sunday Review of Confessions is great and enlightening reading that helps me contextualise and admire ‘Burn’ better. But I still don’t really get anything out of listening to it. Where others perhaps hear sensual reductionism I’m just in search of hooks that aren’t there, missing the point entirely perhaps but still. Not to tempt the bunny but there’s a multi-bunnied singer in this sweet spot of R&B whose first few number ones I enjoy a lot more. 4
Maybe I’m just sad we aren’t discussing the best Girls Aloud single, which would’ve been one of the most obvious 10s I’d ever have given. But besides The Show there was a few other nice things in the top 10: Nina Sky’s Move Ya Body (widely acclaimed then and seemingly forgotten now. The Hyperspace Remix is ace), a George Michael track that I’ll probably see fit to mention in the comments of another bunny, and a track from 1954 whose success, although intended as a one-off, clearly set the most cynical of lightbulbs above RCA/BMG’s collective heads.
I only found out that The Show did NOT get to number one about a decade after its release, absolutely sickening. That would have been my first 10 since Crazy in Love. As it stands, my next 10 is a further 78 Popular entries away.
5/10 for this, I see he has a future bunny, so we’re not ready to talk about The Fall of the House of Usher just yet.
Coincidentally this just came up on Which Decade is Tops….so I think I can safely re-use my comment from that as I don’t think my opinion will have changed much in a fortnight:
Burn – Like fire this is without form or shape, unlike a fire it is in no way hot. Burn? Not even a mild singe (0 PTS)
Male-led r’n’b usually leaves me cold but I find this one particularly unengaging. In Popular terms, it’s probably a 3, not interestingly bad enough for a 1 or 2.
Apologies for the horrible formatting in the above, I seem unable to log in and edit it. Below in a hopefully friendlier layout:
Coincidentally this just came up on Which Decade is Tops….so I think I can safely re-use my comment from that as I don’t think my opinion will have changed much in a fortnight:
“Burn – Like fire this is without form or shape, unlike a fire it is in no way hot. Burn? Not even a mild singe (0 PTS)”
Male-led r’n’b usually leaves me cold but I find this one particularly unengaging. In Popular terms, it’s probably a 3, not interestingly bad enough for a 1 or 2.
Welcome back Tom.
It’s no “Yeah!”, but “Burn” is one of Usher’s better ballads. 6
In the 80s Nile Rodgers lamented that irony was the domain of white songwriters. Bowie could write a song called “Let’s Dance” and have it be fey and strange and queer, but if a black man wrote a song with that title, it had better be a dance anthem.
I guess times changed, because “Burn” burns about as hard as the dark side of Pluto. It sounds drippy and wet and sleek. Hard to honestly appraise, because the better this sort of music is constructed the less I like it. “Fifty-leven days, umpteen hours” is funny.
This feels like a song that’s less than the sum of its parts. The singing’s great, the production is ticking all the boxes of a very slick genre… maybe the slickness is the problem here, it certainly glosses over the pain and there’s not quite the winning hook to burst through and provide a single memorable moment. Although maybe that’s the point, that there isn’t a single moment of clarity in these feelings? This isn’t the best Usher record – that might well be Yeah!, and the “might” is because of the guest spot from Ludacris(ly Lecherous) – but in encapsulating his vocal talent and the way it carried him through multiple trends in the fast-moving world of R&B production, it might be the ur-Usher record. 6
Similarly to Lee this one passed me by at the time. Astute comments all around, so not too much to add from these quarters. I think David has it pretty much on the money myself. I’ll sit on the fence here and plump for a middle of the road 5/10.
My main memory of this on its release is the adverts for the midi ring tone version that either The Hits or TMF showed constantly, though it was sadly accompanied by clips of the song itself rather than the ringtone, leaving me to wonder ever since if it started with a bleepy riff on Usher’s little spoken word monologue.
Struggling to even muster up the energy to make a comment about this song, it’s such a dull nothing of a track. I don’t like Yeah! but at least it has some energy and character. This is just boring and slips from the memory as soon as it’s over.
2/10
Again, as with “Yeah!”, “Burn” was neither “Pop Ya Collar” or “You Make Me Wanna…” for me, and feels the most like a slipstream number one in 2004 getting there on the back of a more widely remembered chart topper. 2.
“The Show” meanwhile, is really the start of what crystallised Girls Aloud and how brilliant they and in turn Xenomania were for me; as I write this, the video, set in a beauty salon called Curls Allowed, and the first to be directed by Trudy Bellinger (who also did the videos for all their bunnies to come), has just this week been restored to 4K on their official YouTube channel, with an accompanying digital reissue of the single to boot, so I’ve been reimmersing myself in the single accordingly.
It’s held up so well for almost 20 years: that jagged synth riff that opens the song is pure audial serotonin. It was also a really fun, witty song lyrically, with an anti promiscuity message and just delivered with the right amount of attitude. I also lived for the “Shoulda known, shoulda cared / Shoulda hung around the kitchen in my underwear” lines. Pop perfection.