Last week, Chris Brown has proven that you can take any situation and turn it into shameless self-promotion for new music. If you’ve been reading my blogs here for a while, you already know I have a fascination with marketing and especially music marketing. I’ve just always brushed shoulders with this throughout my work in various fields. And, we have arrived at a time where, basically, anything goes.
Chris Brown, in my book, is one the luckiest people I have ever seen. I really thought his career was over once the pictures of Rihanna’s bruises surfaced in 2009, but his musical and other creative talents still managed to capture the world since. Still, more incidents followed, and his career was still going strong.
It became his image to have trouble follow him. I have chosen these words carefully, because I do realize that if you are known to fight easily, other people will use that vulnerability to say you are violent in the moments you weren’t even thinking about it.
When Royalty (the daughter, not the album) showed up, I thought maybe Chris would mature a bit, but that only lasted for a short time. Last week, his house got stormed by police, while various news outlets were providing live coverage of this, but more surprising, while Chris himself was sending all kinds of recordings from inside his house to his social media channels.
In the recordings, he responded to some of the coverage of his situation and actually complained about the attention he was getting. Well, Chris, now people like to see what kind of trouble you get yourself into… it is an ‘image’ you helped to create. In the middle of his video rants, he couldn’t help but to plug his latest single “Grass Ain’t Greener”. It was released just days before this happened.
Chris ended up getting arrested for allegedly threatening a woman with a gun and got out on bail. Chris denies the accusation. While this was reported, he, again, decided to use all of the attention to his advantage and announce that new music would be released soon. Well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with spotting an opportunity, but still…. I’ve just spend a whole blog talking about that decision he’s made rather than talk about the music he’s made.
