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The Women Who Scream For Chris Brown
Inside Team Breezy, one of music’s biggest global fandoms who redeemed the singer a long time ago, despite a continued history of harm against women long after Rihanna.
Summer 2010, inside the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Nicki Minaj received the Best New Artist award, Beyoncé won Video of the Year for “Video Phone,” Prince received the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Chris Brown took the stage to honor Michael Jackson on the first anniversary of his untimely death.
It was the 10th annual BET Awards, and a 21-year-old Brown delivered a transcendent performance, evoking the moves and magic of the late King of Pop, who he idolized since he was a kid growing up in Tappahannock, Virginia.
As soon as Brown took the stage, striking one of Jackson’s signature moves with surgical precision, screams wailed inside the auditorium from wall to wall. It was universally understood Brown was delivering the performance he was born to give, a performance he had not given at the network’s 2009 ceremony, mere days after the King of Pop left us.
It was no secret why the rising music superstar was missing in action at the 2009 ceremony. Because 140 days before the King of Pop took his last breath, and on the eve of the 2009 Grammy Awards, singer Rihanna was choked out, bitten, and punched by Brown. The singer pled guilty to felony assault.
But one year later, the vicious attack and image of Rihanna’s battered face, signaling the earliest era of social media virality, faded into translucence when lights hit Brown’s face and his performance sent the culture into a trance state with a medley of Jackson’s greatest hits.
By the time the homage reached its climax and the first few chords of Jackson's “Man in the Mirror” bellowed through the speakers, Brown’s face was soaked in tears. He could hardly sing the words: I’m going to make a change for the rest of my life.
The lyrics seemed to summon memory of what happened that night. We were all thinking it. But “Man in the Mirror” became Brown’s redemption song before the 21 year-old ever redeemed himself.
That’s the enchantment of Black soul men. Jackie Wilson. James Brown. Marvin Gaye. R. Kelly. Rhythm and Blues’s patrilineal legacy of men whose otherworldly alchemy of the carnal and the spiritual eclipses suspicion and rap sheets. Generations of women scream from the seduction of sex and the spirit and battered women scream bloody horror.