On a mild January afternoon outside a dilapidated Mexican restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, Chris Brown ambles up to a freshly painted mural by street artist Kid Zoom and starts giving the spectacular artwork a run for its money. With his white painter’s jumpsuit folded down and tied at the waist—revealing tattoos that span his torso and arms, including a shoulder-seated Jesus, two nipple-encircling angel wings, and the chest-crowning phrase symphonic love—the 21-year-old singer starts busting a few casual moves that soon have Kid Zoom and the rest of Brown’s small entourage madly snapping BlackBerry photos. For three minutes, all eyes are riveted by the series of flips and Capoeria kicks that Brown somehow freezes at the apex, his whole body hanging in mid-air long enough for him to flash broad, boyish smiles for the cameras.
Suddenly, a Spanish-accented, female voice cuts in from the sidelines: “Excuse me!” Eyes turn to find a very pregnant woman standing on the corner holding a children’s book. She points at Brown and then at the book, and calls out, “I’m about to go give birth and I want him to sign this!” Brown looks, does a double-take, yells, “Oh shit!” and runs over to oblige. The woman thanks him profusely, snaps the book shut, and dashes around the corner—presumably straight to the hospital. “Don’t run!” Brown shouts after her. “You’re pregnant!” He laughs and looks at his videographer. “You get that?”
This is exactly the kind of scene Brown needs right about now. Two years ago, hours before his scheduled Grammys performance, Brown got into a physical altercation with then-girlfriend Rihanna, whose gruesome, widely publicized injuries got Brown five years probation, 180 days of community service, and what looked like a swift end to his career. Major corporations dropped him from ad campaigns, radio stations boycotted his music, B.E.T. banned him from their Michael Jackson tribute, and his “comeback” album, Graffiti, sold 316,000 copies—a major disappointment compared to its platinum predecessors. Overnight, Brown went from the new Michael Jackson to the new Mike Tyson—perhaps a mere setback for a Lil Wayne (or even a Charlie Sheen), but sheer catastrophe for the cherub-cheeked R&B Golden Boy, who once dueted with Elmo and performed for Oprah’s Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. What he did wasn’t just horrible, it was a betrayal: America felt played.
But what isn’t fake—and may serve Brown better than any tearful apologies or remorseful Tweets—is his sheer talent: an astounding mix of liquid dance moves, butter-smooth vocals, and blinding charisma that America is slowly proving helpless to resist. Last year, his single “Deuces” debuted at No. 1 on the hip-hop charts and was nominated for two Grammys; he starred alongside Matt Dillon and Idris Elba in the heist thriller Takers(which The New York Times conceded was “kind of cool”); and he performed his own, much-lauded Michael Jackson tribute at the 2010 B.E.T. Awards. Now he’s putting the finishing touches on his fourth album, F.A.M.E.,due out March 22.
Talking with Brown at Record Plant Studios a couple of hours after the photo shoot, he makes it pretty clear that he’s done saying sorry. “To a degree, I think no matter what I do [the media] is always going to go back to the situation, the incident, but my mentality is two fingers up.” He raises his middle fingers and grins—a discomfiting gesture given the circumstances, and not exactly the way to win over a female reporter. “It’s not arrogant,” Brown says after seeing my expression. “It’s not mean. [I realized] if you’re trying to please everybody, you’ll kill yourself. You can label Chris Brown ‘punk reject.’ Whatever. I’m always going to give you great music, I’m always going to do stuff that inspires kids, I’m always going to do positive stuff. But I’m not going to live my life caring about what they say about me because I know who I am.”
Ten years ago, Brown was just a regular kid growing up in Tappahannock, Virginia, the son of a daycare director and a corrections officer. His parents divorced when he was seven and his mom remarried a physically abusive man who turned their home into a warzone. “He made me terrified all the time,” Brown told Giantin 2007. “I remember one night he made her nose bleed. I was crying and thinking, ‘I’m just gonna go crazy on him one day.’”
As a refuge, Brown sang in his church choir and studied gymnastics and karate. He never took dance lessons, instead picking up moves from his birth father. “When he did the moonwalk, that was the coolest thing,” Brown says. “I remember he did it on gravel first—he just slid across those little rocks. I was eight or nine and that made me want to learn from him and start watching Michael [Jackson] more.”
He watched and learned so well that Jackson ended up hand-picking him to perform “Thriller” at the World Music Awards in London in 2006. Brown’s self-titled debut album, released the year before, had gone double platinum and the MJ comparisons were pouring in, so the honor made sense. Afterward, he met Jackson. “My mom said, ‘Do you know any of Chris’s music?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah I know all your stuff…and he sang [‘Shorty Like Mine’] for me. I was blown away. After that, I didn’t need to see him another day in my life.”
Brown did see Jackson again over the years and was actually on his way to the Staples Center to watch one of the rehearsals for the This Is Ittour the day he died. “Me and Jamie Foxx were going to see him and [someone called] and they were like, ‘Hold up. He didn’t show up yet.’ And then we got the call later and it was devastating.”
Jackson’s influence is all over Brown’s new album; he even samples “Human Nature” on a new R&B song called “She Ain’t You.” When he plays it for me in the studio, he mouths along to the words, dancing in his chair, tapping the carpet with his black Nikes. Of the 10 songs I hear, eight of them feel like hits already: all expertly produced and running the gamut from huge club tracks to sexy slow jams to uplifting arena-ready pop songs (or, per Brown, “Bono-big worldly-type records”).
For the album art, Brown is collaborating with Kid Zoom and notorious pop artist Ron English, fulfilling another lifelong passion. His first hustle in high school was painting Looney Tunes characters on T-shirts and selling them for $20 a pop. Since then, he’s gotten into anime and graffiti. At a gallery show last year, he immediately connected with English’s work and even got a tattoo of his art (a baby in a fighter plane). Brown’s lifestyle website, Mechanical Dummy, has an entire section dedicated to art. For Brown, music and art go hand in hand. “My mind sees in color—music paints a picture for me,” he says. “And I’m also [turning] kids that listen to my music onto that culture. And those kids can inspire a whole ‘nother generation, ’cause soon as the kids get inspired, you might have the next Picasso.”
Despite everything, Brown sees himself as a role model and strives to embody one in his songs. “Music is about everybody,” he says with a shrug. “It’s not about the artist. Ultimately people like an artist because of how their songs make them feel.” It’s fitting, then, that the last song he plays for me at the studio is a Euro dance club track called “Beautiful People.” Synths flash like strobe lights over a thumping beat as Brown urges in a breathy voice, “Live your life, live your life, let the love inside / It’s your life, it’s your life, got to live it right.” Whether he’s singing to his fans or the man in the mirror, it’s hard to tell.
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