Doc Zeus’ real name is Dr. Trollface Elias Zeus Jr., PhD. Doctor in Player Hateology.
There’s a certain something that I admire in Chris Brown. Granted, pound for pound, one of the most loathsome individuals the entertainment industrial complex has spewed out, but there’s one admirable quality that makes him uniquely fascinating: his pathological self delusion.
Clearly, he should not still have an entertainment career. Society can forgive our wayward sons and daughters, but it takes extraordinary circumstances to overcome a crime so viscerally heinous as Chris Brown’s. We forgave or, at least, chose to ignore R. Kelly for (*allegedly*) unleashing torrents of steaming hot uric acid upon the face of a juvenile groupie, but Kelly is the rare visionary genius that only the truly insane can fully appreciate. That’s what the “Ignition (Remix)” will do for you. Chris Brown beat one of America’s pop princesses within and inch of her life and left her on the side of the road for fate to claim. Yet he seems shockingly apoplectic about society’s rage over his crime.
At the time of the incident, Chris Brown was best known as one of those generic, pretty boy R&B singers that spring upon rap’s crossover dreck like lilting, falsetto morning glories. If anything, he was the doofy asshat that lucked into sleeping with Rihanna on a regular basis. Likely, he was destined to break up with the singer and release a few albums to diminishing returns until he faded into the Montell Jordan Memorial Museum for Faded R&B Sensations. That was until he assaulted Rihanna. In the aftermath of a series of grossly insincere media mea culpas and a weak of suspended assault conviction, Chris Brown became a bigger star than ever.
I’m not sure if it’s because of a patriarchal society’s latent contempt for women’s rights issues (or they just really, really like “Look At Me Now”) but Chris Brown slid a little too easily back into his role of a crooning lover man. At the moment, he’s got multiple hits in the top ten and back selling millions of records.
Ultimately, what I “admire” find endlessly hilarious about Chris Brown is his misanthropic sense of entitled self-importance that defines his post-incident character. His Twitter account is littered with ill-advised, unconsciously hypocritical tirades against what he must see as conspiracy of people out to get him for little to no reason. At times, he paints himself as the victim of White America’s latent desire to crush successful black men. He almost sees himself as the heir to throne of historically oppressed black entertainers and athletes like Muhammad Ali who run afoul with the establishment because of their blackness.
Brown seems genuinely shocked to the point of righteous anger that anybody would have a problem with his success in 2011. When it’s not racism, he’s the victim of haters envious of the women he’s with, the cars he drives or the money he has. At no point, does it occur to him in the midst of one of his ill-advised rants that people might find a convicted, violent felon in the spotlight (especially one who escaped criminal punishment relatively lightly – presumably because of his fame)
When confronted with this reality a la Good Morning, America!, he threw a massive tantrum and destroyed the show’s green room. It’s with this sense of self-entitlement that I approach his latest and greatest feat in the field of delusional self grandeur, his “rap mixape,” Boy In Detention. After achieving remarkable success with his top ten single, “Look At Me Now,” from his latest album, F.A.M.E. (a hilarious acronym “Forgiving All My Enemies), in which Breezy ostensibly raps, Brown decided that the world needed to hear him feebly kick limp 16s over bargain rack versions of high end producer’s beats. Boy In Detention is one of the least original, unimaginative rap releases you have and will ever hear. This is a record that makes Finally Famous look like The Cold Vein.
On the mixtape, Breezy seems to ape and combine about a half dozen flows of your favorite rappers into an amalgam of processed goo. He liberally steals everything from Drake (or judging from the comment section of Abe Beame’s Finally Famous review: Big Sean’s) hash taggery, to Lil Wayne’s contented hyena laugh, used to punctuate a particularly scatological vagina metaphor. It’s as if his entire frame of reference for hip hop began and ended with terrestrial rap radio from 2006 and onwards.
When he’s not making songs that run the cliche well of pop rap dry, he’s making cringe inducing sex metaphors. At no point does it occur to Chris Brown that bragging that he “beats the pussy up” is a shockingly ill-advised idea for a man who is most notoriously known as a woman beater. There are no songs worth your time on this record and in fact, the only moment of sustained curiosity belongs to the shockingly competent (if not virtuosic) verse delivered by Justin Fucking Bieber on “Ladies Love Me.”
If there is a saving grace on this record, it’s that there seems to be a collection of half competent beats produced by (what I assume must be extorted) legitimate hip hop producers inexplicably floating about the turds in this toilet bowl. I do not know what compelled 9th Wonder, David Banner, the Justice League and Big K.R.I.T. to want to produce records for this outing, but one assumes that involves a large dump truck of money and enough vodka to drown their sadness in. This is a bad record that makes other bad records use to feel superior. It gives the equivalent feeling of the morning after a groupie sleeps with Chris Brown and she hears a Rihanna song on the radio on the cab back to her apartment.
In closing, do not listen to this record ever.
Download:
ZIP:Chris Brown-Boy in Detention (Left-Click)
