Summer Work task 2 - R&B Genre

Chris Brown

Christopher Maurice "Chris" Brown (born May 5, 1989) is an American R&B singer, songwriter, dancer, and actor. He made his recording debut in late 2005 with the self-titled album Chris Brown at the age of 16. The album featured the hit single "Run It!", which topped the Billboard Hot 100, making Brown the first male artist to have his debut single top the chart since Montell Jordan in 1995. The album has sold over two million copies in the United States and was certified double Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. For more information about Chris Brown look at the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Brown_(American_entertainer.



'Run It' was his first single released, throughout this video he established himself as a person and an artist as 'the next best thing' and portrays the attitude of being over confident and 'grown up' mentally and sexually considering his age of 16. The song itself it about finding the attractive woman and getting her to be 'his'; this sort of cocky persona works well to portray himself as the successful young musician, whose confidence, will most likely take him to where he can be.



The song 'Take you down' was yet another of Chris Browns successful songs over the years. In this period of his career his music had turned more soul or urban genre, making more meaningful music involving more intimate topics, for instance sex and love. Take You down was, at the time, one of the earlier songs to be very detailed towards sexuality, combined with the live performance (seen and used as his music video for the song) showed clearly that Chris Brown had become a success and a sex icon. Using his sex appeal and his melodical voice Chris Brown soon became even more famous than ever, and reached a peak in his musical career.

At this time it was worldwide that Chris Brown and fellow R&B singer Rihanna had been dating for just under 2 years when Chris Brown was reported for physically assaulting and injuring Rihanna. At this point, he lost all hope for a career in the near future. This act of assault damaged his reputation in music and in business, he resulted in being imprisoned for a short period, then to be released with a year community service and a restraining order from Rihanna. Chris Brown lost a large fan base, especially the Rihanna fans, and he started to receive a lot of negativity and abuse.

This downward spiral continued on for the next year, resulting in his album 'Graffiti' ending up at number 55 on the charts, when considering all his other albums this was considered a 'failure'. From that moment on Chris Brown began to recreate himself, trying to gain his fans back and start a whole new musical career.

In august 2010 Chris Brown recreated his image, resorting in whole body coverage of tattoos, bleach blond hair... and a supposedly purpose naked photo leakage to gain media coverage. All these changes worked, and Chris Brown was back in the media again.

2010 to Present day Chris Brown has returned to his 'Bad Boy' persona which he created back in 2005. His newest album 'F.A.M.E' was released recently this year, after his new image and his continuous media coverage though twitter and the media news he reached success again. This album cover was designed to show a new era in Chris Brown's music career; the filter of colours showing mainly only yellows, purples, blues and browns, he most likely chose to use these colours as they seem to stand out in comparison to a variety of brigh colours.