CHRIS BROWN
Ben Rayner wonders how the R&B star still manages to find success in a #MeToo era,
Two Fridays ago, as occasionally happens, a new release from Chris Brown landed in my inbox.
Few things have the capacity to enrage me more and that’s not because I harbour any great personal distaste for the music made by the 29-year-old American R&B star. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t listened to a note of it in almost 10 years.
Not willingly, anyway. Brown is occasionally, forcibly thrust in front of me in the course of doing my job (often on the Grammy Awards, which enrages me even more, as I shall explain in a moment), but I take solace in the fact that Canada, in the institutional sense, seems to share — along with the governments of the U.K. and Australia, for the record — my “no Chris Brown, ever” policy.
“The good people of the Canadian government,” as he termed our domestic immigration officials in a swiftly deleted Tweet back in February 2015 — when the oft-arrested singer’s “criminal inadmissibility” forced the last-minute cancellation of gigs at Montreal’s Bell Centre and Toronto’s Air Canada Centre — have derailed his last couple of attempts to perform in our town, thus sparing this music critic the discomfort of pretending to be an objective observer at shows he would have approached with an insurmountably bilious level of bias.
Anyone who has kept half an eye on the entertainment media since Brown beat the living crap out of — and hospitalized — his then-girlfriend Rihanna on the eve of the Grammys in February 2009 knows why. This is a man who has demonstrated a pattern of abusive behaviour toward women and a pattern of violent behaviour in general for a decade, been dragged into court and rehab facilities and prison again and again because of those behaviours, and yet continues to get a free ride from the music industry.
Does Brown have pictures of someone we don’t know about? Because we have lots pictures of him and his doings: multiple mug shots, those infamous 2009 photos of a bruised and bloodied Rihanna and, last March, photos of him strangling a woman in Miami in jest that nevertheless raised eyebrows around the world because no one could actually believe that Chris Brown was only strangling a woman in jest.
It’s an admittedly unscientific metric, but a recent Google search of the name “Chris Brown” and the words “violence” and “women” returned 6,060,000 hits, including several detailed lists of the legal tangles flowing into which Brown’s inability to control a clearly explosive temper have led him. Rolling Stone explicitly called its piece a “Timeline of Chris Brown’s History of Violence Towards Women.” The same search revealed that Brown even has his own dedicated thread on the U.S. National Domestic Violence Hotline’s website.
And yet, how did the news release from RCA Records trumpeting the release of Brown’s new single “Undecided” characterize the “inimitable … Grammy Award-winning, platinumselling singer, songwriter, producer, actor and business entrepreneur”? As “a consummate entertainer who has shifted the climate of R&B culture since his 2005 debut,” as “a chart-topping force,” as “an accomplished entrepreneur and business owner” with a “commitment to philanthropy … as important to him as his professional pursuits — including his dedication to the Symphonic Love Foundation, a charitable organization that he founded which supports and creates arts programs for youth.”
Nowhere did the promo materials mention that Brown was, last May, named in a lawsuit filed by an anonymous woman who claimed that she’d been held against her will at his home, raped by Brown’s friend and forced to perform multiple sex acts on Brown’s male and female friends. Nowhere did the materials mention that in June 2017 Brown’s ex-girlfriend, model Karrueche Tran, successfully obtained a restraining order against him for the next five years because he had allegedly threatened to kill her and texted her with threats such as “Bitch I will beat the s--t out of you” and “I promise you I will make your life hell.”
Nor did the press release point out the numerous other incidents where Brown has, since he pleaded guilty to felony assault in 2009 over the Rihanna incident, dodged jail by doing community service, submitting to domesticviolence counselling and receiving five years of probation, the terms of which he repeatedly violated.
“He’s been accused of stealing a woman’s phone, shoving a woman to the floor, forcibly ejecting a woman from his bus, punching a woman in the face in a Las Vegas night club and threatening a woman with a gun,” an aghast editorial in the U.K. observed last November, when Brown was creeping everybody out by posting bug-eyed emoji responses to Rihanna’s new branded-lingerie pics on Instagram.
Let’s not forget the fights with Drake and Frank Ocean and numerous photographers he has gotten into over the past 10 years, too. And still, media coverage of the release of “Undecided” — a song in which, Billboard tells us, “the 29-year-old opens up about the strains of his current relationship and the impact it has had on his mental state” — turned a typically blind eye to Brown’s despicable personal life and the tune rocketed to No. 1 on the iTunes R&B chart right away, as usual.
“It’s as if he’s untouchable,” the Miami New Times recently commented, comparing Brown to another man who’s failed to face serious consequences for his harassment of women, President Donald Trump. “They commit so many vile acts, but fall just short of losing all of their supporters and thus maintain their power.”
Brown’s success is gigantic. He has six platinum albums and has sold more than 30 million records worldwide and, as RCA Records recently crowed, “has made more Billboard Hot 100 entries since the start of his career than any contemporary male singer alive to date, spending 160 consecutive weeks charting on the Hot 100.”
Look at Wikipedia’s list of awards Brown has won or been up for since Rihanna missed the Grammys because she was recovering in a hospital bed from the beating he’d laid on her; he has been nominated for nine more Grammy Awards alone since then and won one for Best R&B Album for F.A.M.E. in 2012.
That year was also, incidentally, the year that Brown came back to perform on the Grammys, with Rihanna also on the bill, and could have done the classy thing and apologized for past indiscretions in a public forum. But he didn’t. He has been back on the Grammy show for the past two years. It’s sickening.
Look, lots of artists are horrible people and no fun to be around. But there’s a difference between being a hateful prima donna or a ruthless bandleader and being caught red-handed repeatedly committing violent and abusive acts. How does Brown keep getting a free ride, especially in the #MeToo era? Much has been made of the loyalty of his fans, “#TeamBreezy,” but their unwavering support usually takes the form of online victim-shaming or dogmatic statements that Brown is a victim of racism and a lying media, or that he’s simply a misunderstood child of abuse himself. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.
That Brown, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder during one of his stints in rehab — he was kicked out of that facility after three weeks — is a child of abuse is true, and because of this I harbour a modicum of sympathy for him. Abusers aren’t born. They’re curated. As the Guardian observed in a review of the biopic Chris Brown: Welcome to My Life last spring: “The film’s implication is that Brown, who witnessed the domestic abuse of his mother by his stepfather as a child, was not equipped to handle the intense public backlash and media scrutiny and thus entered a spiral of violent outbursts and drug use that was difficult for him to break free from, despite his sincere regrets.”
Actions speak louder than regrets, however. And actions that cause more regrets don’t signify any progress. The only way we might get through to Chris Brown that it’s time to change is if the public and the industry turn their backs on him, deprive him of the attention he so clearly craves. I have no faith that’s going to happen. Look how many years of repeated accusations it’s taken to finally bring R. Kelly to his knees. Delete these people. They don’t deserve your love.