If I were on the Chris Brown PR payroll, I would suggest he just cop to all of BROWN being AI, because if not, he’s got bigger problems. It’s hard to find anything redeemable about the album, and I tried hard. I wanted to like “Slow Jamz” because it has the cloudy, slow-mo bounce of DeVanté Swing’s Da Bassment demos, but Brown’s history gives his sex diaries a sinister edge: “When it feels this good you can’t say no.” I wanted to like “#BodyGoals,” with Tank, because it’s always kind of funny seeing the old heads try to make TikTok trend music. But Brown doesn’t match Tank’s silly yearning; his lust is a crutch. He’s not even good at glomming onto trends anymore, which had been his thing since the very beginning, considering “Run It!” was a diet “Yeah!” His sexy drill one-off, “It Depends,” has been getting nonstop play on Hot 97 for a year, and my theory is that when he co-opted Cash Cobain’s sound, he flattened the coolness of the entire subgenre. I think he picked up his Jamaican patois on the Vybz Kartel-assisted “Fuck and Party” from studying Taye Diggs in How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Compared to the way he butchers Memphis club rap on “Call Your Name,” a $uicideBoy$ mixtape might as well be Mystic Stylez.
BROWN is bereft of any ideas that don’t have to do with its star’s own victimhood. Even the tracks that appear like intimate glimpses at his relationships are really just him whining about the media. “I admit it, it was different/We were only kids, who we kiddin’?/Put a hit on my name if that’s what it takes,” he scream-sings over the power-gospel of “Hate Me,” 17 years after Rihanna. Amid very timely Travis Scott “Yeah” ad-libs and a Migos-style triplet flow on “For the Moment,” he’s got second chances on his mind. In case you didn’t know, Chris Brown spiritually lives in 2015, a convenient time for him because that’s a little before “cancel culture” hit the streets. He’s probably somewhere right now listening to “Trap Queen” and watching Paul Walker drive into the distance at the end of Furious 7. There’s also “It’s Personal,” which is, as you might have guessed, personal. Over hokey acoustic guitars he raps in a hushed tone, “I just want respect and I’ll die for that.” Oh my God, we know.
This album is a real piece of shit. Why even write about it? For years, traditional media has been tiptoeing around the popularity of Chris Brown, and in reality, that benefits nobody but him. The lack of critical engagement with his music has allowed him to contextualize his own redemption with statistics and sob stories. But if I hadn’t read Greg Tate’s hilarious teardown of the racial sellout energy of Michael Jackson’s Bad or dream hampton’s furious op-ed on Dr. Dre’s violence and hip-hop culture misogyny, I would have never known that not everyone in the moment was buying what they were selling. As Chris Brown prepares for a joint stadium tour with Usher and aims to complete his redemption with something like a Vegas residency or the Super Bowl halftime show, it’s worth documenting these feelings in real time, especially as information only gets harder to find. Not every musical legend deserves to be a martyr.
So maybe one day, when Forever: The Chris Brown Story hits the cineplex, and a son turns to his dad and asks, “Pop, if Chris Brown was so talented, why was the world so mean to him?” they can pull up some shit to read like I did. Or maybe everything negative will be scrubbed from the internet by then, and dad will feed his boy the good ol’ fashioned, “That’s what happens to you when you’re a man in this country,” as they fire up a video of Chris Brown landing a backflip on beat.
