Stop reblogging that Chris Brown album review
It’s not big.
It’s not clever.
It’s not funny.
The dignified thing to do would have been not to review the album at all— as many publications didn’t— rather than spin a few incredibly feeble “lols” at an unmissable sitting duck.
Or if you were that incensed by Brown’s crimes, you’d write something more pertinent and in-depth that raised the issues around what he did, rather than shitting out a few lame jokes.
And as Maura points out, Brown mentions two brands of condom on the record.
Plus: It’s not funny in a format — capsule reviews — where your word count requires you to be funny and incisive; it wastes so many words in being unfunny; it’s rockist; it’s trying to be contrarian when this isn’t even contrarian by Chris Brown capsule-review Tumblr meme standards; it’s offensive (“skitzy”?), it’s not even accurate in being offensive (schizophrenia is not DID); it isn’t even the best dismissal like this.
Also, just to flesh out issues already hinted at, we live in a culture that has been -is - patriarchal, homophobic, racist and lots of other things. Chris Brown abusing his girlfriend is the horrible edge of that culture, where most probably half of the artists in your last.fm top 50 are/were at least a little bit bigoted in some sense. That’s not to apologise or normalise what he’s done, but just to highlight the kind of weird, snobby, rockist attitude that the writer of reviews like this takes - presumably in between listening to John Lennon albums.
Brown’s unlikely to ever become a giant in his field, but his music is in conversation with the culture around it and - if I can valorise the profession for a moment - it’s the duty of the critic to examine that, make links, work out why, attempt to understand it and so on. To get all post-structural on your asses, what Brown intends with his music, what he’s done in his life, really doesn’t matter.
By all means remember what he’s done when listening to his music. And if you just don’t want to because it makes you feel uneasy, then fine. But if we’re critically disregarding stuff because the morality of the artist/thinker is abhorrent to us, then there’s a lot of book burning, concept forgetting and mp3 deleting to be done.
