BROWN

If you’ve paid any attention to the last 15 years of Chris Brown, then it comes as no surprise that BROWN, his 12th solo album, kicks off with his redemption saga in full swing. “They keep tryna’ rewrite what I survived/Judgin’ chapters they never read inside,” he sings over the beat-the-odds motivation pop of “Leave Me Alone.” A long time ago, Brown realized—possibly inspired by the efforts of the estate of Michael Jackson, who he worshipped—that he needed to shape his own narrative: He was a victim of the media conspiring against him. And if he kept reminding fans of their nostalgia for his youthful innocence and of how cool his backflips are, eventually enough people would take his version of history as gospel—or just stop caring about whatever mistakes he made altogether.

That’s not to say that he hasn’t been an incredibly popular hitmaker all along, but for a while there, people kept their loyalties to Team Breezy on the low. Those days are long gone. The other week, we were talking Chris in the barbershop and one of the barbers was ready to throw down in defense of his honor. In 2025, Brown won his first Grammy award in over a decade: Best R&B Album for the deluxe edition of 11:11. Then he celebrated two decades in the game with Breezy Bowl XX, one of the highest-grossing stadium tours of the past several years, where celebrities and R&B royalty (Mary J. Blige, Kehlani) fanned out over him every night. After Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, Brown posted on his Instagram story, “I think its safe to say.. they need me!”—a wish that seems possible if BROWN is a smash. The Chris Brown taboo has been lifted.

If the musician biopic industry doesn’t collapse, I can already see how Forever: The Chris Brown Story will go down. He was a chubby-cheeked choir boy from the trailer parks of small-town Virginia, with a God-given gift for loose-limbed footwork (and flips) and singing about teen love with a Tevin Campbell-like gooiness. From his 2005 debut “Run It!,” a crunk R&B jam that hit No. 1 on the Hot 100, he was the most beloved male R&B prodigy since Usher. Until 2009, when, at 19 years old, pictures leaked online of the bloody beating he had given to the face of his then-girlfriend, the pop supernova Rihanna. From there, the story will recount how the media rejected his strides toward growth—skipping over the additional allegations of abuse and sexual assault that come up later—and how, through sheer talent, determination, and the support of Team Breezy, he became the kind of musical success and people’s champ everyone knew he could be. As he says on the BROWN intro, “If you only see my past/You don’t see my resurrection.”

At risk of being lost to time, though, is the way Brown’s battering of Rihanna was used to give his music an emotional complexity it didn’t have before the incident. His first two albums have joints that were classics in my iPod (“Yo (Excuse Me Miss),” “Kiss Kiss”), but back then, he and his Scream Tour contemporaries shared a relatively cookie-cutter teen idol image that you could imagine he would have struggled to grow beyond. That was on his mind in a 2007 Vibe cover story, around the time of album number two, which ends by revealing how aware he was that his longevity would depend on tweaks to his public persona. “All I have to do is one video where I take my shirt off and grind on a girl, and then I’m a bad boy,” he said, with “mischief” reportedly audible in his voice. “That image can flip anytime I want it to.”

That pivot didn’t go the way he planned, but Brown’s reputational crash accelerated his reinvention by forcing him to go on a run of independently released, DJ-hosted mixtapes that infused the rebellious spirit of a rapper into his malleable R&B foundation. By the time he returned to the center of mainstream pop culture in the early 2010s, his music was edgier and raunchier, and his never-ending comeback story of a broken man trying to right his wrongs in the eye of an unforgiving public began. “Award shows, I pour my heart out/And people still steady tryna point my flaws out,” he sing-rapped on “Champion,” a 2011 guest verse on a single from the British rapper Chip. Suddenly, to be a Chris Brown fan was deeper than just liking his music or his athletic dance moves, or thinking that he was the prettiest lightskin to hit BET since Ginuwine (though that helped)—it was to believe he was the ultimate victim of industry politics and double standards. It was to root for a talented Black man to triumph, regardless of the truth. It was to view his physical abuse of women as a rite of passage on the journey to becoming a man.

All of the overstuffed albums and Billboard hits he’s racked up since then are tainted with that context. None more than BROWN, which isn’t romantic or funny or sexy or sultry or dancey or soulful or vulnerable or honest or creative or inspired whatsoever. It’s soulless, hit-chasing music with nothing going for it if you aren’t personally invested in the Chris Brown culture wars.

The empty dread is present in his melodies, which over the years have become unstylishly digital, unlike, say, the kiddie-bop smoothness of “Say Goodbye” or the ratchet R&B Auto-Tune foolery of “Loyal.” There’s a pitch-perfect sheen over his singing that makes him barely sound like a real human. On “Colours,” a robotic, late-stage-MJ-style ballad, his wails of “I’m scarred” never hit because he sounds like a mopey pain rapper without the vocal cracks and imperfections that give real ones their rawness. His heart isn’t in the freak&B slow jam of “Honey Pack,” which sounds like someone tried to recreate the boy-band hums and horniness of Pretty Ricky with Suno: “I’m tryna put my tongue all in between your thighs/Until a nigga lick your heart.”

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.