![]() ![]() The first and most egregious example is 'New Flame', where Chris Brown is joined by Rick Ross dropping a marginally interesting verse blending sports and luxury rap imagery, but he's also paired with Usher - and Usher blows Chris Brown off the stage. And yet nobody told Chris Brown that, because he chose to overload this album with contemporaries in R&B and hip-hop who are significantly more interesting than he is, especially given the heavy abuse of Autotune and pitch correction on Chris Brown's voice. I've said in the past that when placed against his contemporaries in modern R&B, Chris Brown rarely brings a unique stage presence and personality to the table, and the worst possible thing he could do is invite those comparisons. ![]() So let's start with the biggest problem on this album: Chris Brown himself. That being said, it's an album that in its deep cuts shows Chris Brown starting to become a bit of a better songwriter, albeit not consistently enough to make this album worth salvaging. Well, it's better than Fortune and Graffiti, but that isn't exactly an endorsement, because it's a Chris Brown album displaying all the problems that haven't gone away in album after album, which ultimately consign it to the books of mediocrity, at least in my books. But I figured I'd try to be fair and give Chris Brown the chance he heartily does not deserve and I listened to this record: how is it? Even Forgiving All My Enemies had its fair share of turds like 'Deuces' and 'Look At Me Now' and 'She Ain't You' interspersed between the upbeat dance tracks that were the saving grace of that record.Īnd thus I've had a certain amount of morbid curiosity in looking up X, the long-delayed record from Chris Brown that promised to go more towards R&B than dance pop - which made sense, given the changing trends on the charts, but every single one of the singles was giving me a really bad feeling about this record. And when I say 'worst', I mean that Graffiti and Fortune were some of the worst albums of their respective years and deserve nothing more than scorn and derision because they are absolute torture to listen through. ![]() And on that note, Chris Brown has made some of the worst music of the past five years. Well, here's my policy: it becomes important to understand why certain songwriting choices were made, but ultimately the art has to stand on its own regardless of the artist's life/experiences. And it gets even harder when it becomes plainly apparent the artist's life and experience has influenced his songwriting, so where does one draw the line? It's not worth my time to go through the banner list of all the terrible things this guy has said and done over the past five years, as well as the fact that he's clearly learned nothing from it thanks to a total lack of accountability, but all of that can distract many critics from judging the art fairly instead of judging the artist. That's not quite the case here - because Chris Brown's music is easily the least interesting and least hateable element of his persona. It's something that can be anathema to some people, because to them the artist's presence is so intertwined with what the art is that they can't see the separation, and thus they perceive any attack on the art as an attack on the artist, an attack that is often undeserved or might be considered unfair. One of the hardest thing for any critic to do is to separate one's feelings regarding the artist from the art itself.
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