“Ladies, happy Valentine’s Day,” smiled Chris Brown, ladling on the charm, before rather puncturing the romance of the moment by addressing the gents too: “if you don’t get some p**** at this concert…” Mind you, treating your partner to a V-Day trip to see an R&B star notorious for violently assaulting Rihanna in 2009 might generally be considered a courting faux pas offensive enough to make them spit out their Crunchy Frog.
That Brown returned to London for the first of four nights at the O2 as the third biggest R&B singer of the past decade (after Drake and Rihanna) is arguably cancel culture’s greatest fail to date. But from the moment Brown descended on wires into a neon-heavy show seemingly set in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk Tiger Tiger, there was certainly a shallowness to proceedings.
Coming so hard on the heels of Rihanna’s medley of iconic hits at the Super Bowl, even Brown appeared to have realised that his music – an unimaginative parade of Autotuned, rap-flecked R&B, EDM rave pop, lascivious balladry and Michael Jackson pastiche – is comparatively inconsequential. Dancing with his sci-fi crew, impressively acrobatic and Jacko-esque as it was, always took precedence over singing; the backing track handled a good fifty per cent of the vocals, giving the set the air of a glorified public appearance.
And though Brown rattled through snippets and highlights of fifty tracks over two hours, the stand-outs often piggy-backed on more memorable samples such as Shanice’s I Love Your Smile (on the uplifting Undecided). And amongst the numerous major transatlantic hits – Run It!, Kiss Kiss, Go Crazy, the butter-wouldn’t-melt boyfriend ballad With You – none could be classed as historic. Like, say, Umbrella.
Brown did his best to shuffle his standard-issue R&B pop into definable chunks. A “history lesson” section presented early singles such as Poppin’ and Turn Up The Music in chronological order, while a segment dedicated largely to his latest album Breezy merged into an assortment of his most ‘80s-style R&B ballads. Although you couldn’t imagine Luther Vandross getting away with charmer lines like “I want you to scream, but not in a bad way” from Dream, or endless visuals of naked nymphs both Heavenly and Hellish, like a video diary of Dante’s tour of the afterlife if had only stopped off at the strip clubs.
As the dance troupe threw roses into the crowd during a quiz show section where crowd screams decided the next song, Brown clearly wanted to win London’s love, and 20,000 wholeheartedly succumbed. But we left unable to shake an earlier, creepier image of Brown inviting a “special girl” onstage for Take You Down, grinding in her lap and going in for a smooch while a circle of intimidating men closed in, none of whom appeared to be a qualified intimacy co-ordinator. Next year, best splash out on Paris.
