Brown asked Davis to become his manager, and she agreed. After a couple of months of contract negotiations, Davis lost her Def Jam job in one of those all-too-common corporate reshuffles. Davis brought Brown to LA Reid, her boss, and Reid immediately wanted to sign Brown. Shortly after his arrival, Brown auditioned for a Def Jam A&R exec named Tina Davis. The Hitmission producers, impressed, set Brown up with a vocal coach, and he recorded a demo tape with them.Īt 15, Chris Brown dropped out of high school and moved to New York to try and score a contract. One day, while a 13-year-old Brown was helping out at his father’s gas station, he sang an Usher song for a Virginia production team called Hitmission Records. Brown sang in church choir and at local talent shows. (Madonna’s “ Like A Prayer” was the #1 song in America when Chris Brown was born.) Brown’s mother worked at a daycare center, and his father was a prison guard who later ran a gas station. Just like “Yeah!,” “Run It!” went straight to #1.Ĭhris Brown is a native of Tappahannock, a tiny Virginia town about halfway between Richmond and Fredericksburg. “Run It!” is Chris Brown’s version of “Yeah!,” right down to the exclamation point in the title. With “ Yeah!,” Usher had established a blueprint for hard, urgent, rap-adjacent club-pop, and you didn’t have to sing as well as Usher to make a song like that. As a singer, Chris Brown wasn’t anywhere near the level of Usher, but that didn’t really matter. He could sing, and he could really, really dance. He was handsome and photogenic and relatively charming. Even more than his Scream Tour peers, Chris Brown came across as a baby Usher. Usher had just sold millions upon millions of copies of Confessions.
The whole Scream Tour framework, built to support teenage R&B heartthrobs, was still up and running. In 2005, R&B still dominated the Billboard Hot 100. The Chris Brown who recorded “Run It!” was still innocent, but you don’t have to get too deep into Brown’s character to conclude that “Run It!” isn’t an especially good song.Ĭhris Brown came along at exactly the right time. It’s hard to separate the current version of Chris Brown from the fresh-faced 16-year-old kid who reached #1 with his Usher-biting debut single, but that’s what we’re going to attempt here. Brown’s ongoing success paints a bleak picture of a world where a sufficiently famous person can just keep on being a piece of shit forever, as long as he markets himself right and continues to generate income for his corporate benefactors. A few years after Chris Brown first got famous, he viciously battered his even-more-famous girlfriend, and he used his new notoriety to successfully carve out a bad-boy lane - a truly fucked-up turn of events that’ll figure into future columns.Īll these years later, Chris Brown continues to do despicable bullshit, and he remains enormously successful.
JUELZ SANTANA DIPSET KEEP IT REEL UPDATE
Doublemint gum could hire Chris Brown to update their old jingle, and that updated jingle could become a major hit.
For the first few years of his career, this was how the world viewed Chris Brown. This was a huge part of the Chris Brown sales pitch: This was a small-town teenager who just wanted to be Michael Jackson. Even more impressive: He could do all this without lip-syncing or losing his breath. I did not lose my mind for Brown, but I remember being impressed by his sheer physicality. The girls who were in the stadium that day lost their minds for him. Brown didn’t have any special guests or big surprises. That struck me as being the exact right length for a Chris Brown set in 2006. Blige and T.I., and his set lasted all of three songs. That day, the loudest cheers might’ve gone to Chris Brown, the Virginia R&B singer who’d just celebrated his 17th birthday.Ĭhris Brown came to the Summer Jam stage in between Mary J. Swizz Beatz crowned Busta Rhymes the new king of New York - put an actual crown on his head and everything - which looked silly at the time and which looks even sillier today. Jermaine Dupri brought Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey to the stage, but the two stars didn’t really do anything they just smiled and waved. By the time I made it to my first Summer Jam in 2006, the show’s wattage had dimmed a bit.
In 2001, for instance, Jay-Z’s Summer Jam set included a Michael Jackson cameo and the opening shot in his feud with Nas. Historically, Hot 97’s annual New Jersey stadium spectacle Summer Jam has been a star-studded and unpredictable affair. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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