Despite what his recent “Holla at Me” video suggested, Chris Brown is not transitioning to rapping full time: Breezy’s new mixtape Fan of a Fan — a collaboration with Young Money emcee Tyga (it’s like R. Kelly and Jay-Z’s Best of Both Worlds, only infinitely less high profile) that was released last night at midnight — finds Brown singing way more than flowing. This is a good thing.
Brown’s actually a competent, if thoroughly generic, rapper, but he’d basically need to be late-eighties Rakim to stop that theoretical leap from being quickly and rightly dismissed as a desperate shot at career revitalization. It’s also an inconsequential thing: Even when sticking to his once bulletproof lover-man shtick, as he mostly does on Fan, Brown is irredeemably creepy. Forget the actual misogyny — despite his best efforts, songs like “Number One,” where Brown is supposedly sweetly romancing a lady, come off like threats (“you know that I want it, girl / so just let me get it, girl.”). Also, there is a track called “Like a Virgin Again” that we are going to spend the rest of the day attempting to unhear.
Here’s one of the rap songs, “48 Bar Rap”:
And you can download all of Fan of a Fan at Mechanical Dummy.
