Chris Brown–Up To You

Not a single, but F.A.M.E. was released on 18th March 2011.
Billboard: –
UK: –

After a bunch of singles that ranged from weak (No BS, Deuces) to well, okay (Look At Me Now, Yeah 3X I guess, Beautiful People) and perhaps decent (Next 2 You) I decided to check out a few of the other tracks on Chris Brown’s new album. Up To You was a standout for me.

This is more my kind of thing, really. In terms of instrumentation and production, for some reason I was really reminded of Usher’s U Got It Bad. The slow, more traditional approach works here as it did on Usher’s song (they’re not about the same thing, but the idea of relative passivity is maintained across both songs). As a piece to listen to, Up To You is a pretty decent one (I do have an objection though: the awkward use of the swear-word to open the verses is unnecessary; while justifiable it doesn’t ring so well in the ears). The bridge and choruses are done well, I’d think. I like the (I’ve made so many tears, I don’t wanna make no, make no more) part.

Like most 2011 pop songs, there ARE lyrical deficiencies, unfortunately;

(Verse 2)
What the hell babe
Make me wanna jump out an airplane

Eh? It doesn’t help that I’m made to recall B.o.B’s Airplanes and Tyler The Creator’s Yonkers when presented with this kind of lyric. Perhaps the wtf-ness of this is attempted to be justified in the next line (The way it feels, I just can’t explain) so I can semi-buy this, but it’s a very strange idea for love, I find. It’s introduced out of nowhere, really.

(Bridge)
I’ve made so many tears I don’t wanna make no, make no more
So give me your list, yes I’m checking things off
Ready to go to work, baby you can be boss

Comparing love to what would presumably be a to-do list isn’t my idea of a romantic gesture. Yes, Acts of Service is a love language, but I still find such a comparison awkward. Given that work is frequently associated with the notion of a daily grind and being separate from play or pleasure (though they CAN be found together, for many people they’re not), I’m not so sure comparing devotion to work is the best idea as well.

Not to mention the grammatical error – ‘baby you can be the boss’ would be better.

Nevertheless, the general approach behind the song works for me. Perhaps I’m a little idealistic, but I do often enjoy songs where the singer/persona takes on a lower-key approach, learns, develops and grows, and Up To You definitely does have such elements. (It could also be because the Billboard charts are so frequently filled with either hostile a la F**k You, Rolling in the Deep, vapid e.g. Just Can’t Get Enough or Down on Me, deceptive like Born this Way or bad such as Tonight, The Lazy Song material – not that the former two categories are bad, but it can be tiring to listen to such songs too frequently.) As far as I’m concerned, it’s a clear pass and a decent song – though it doesn’t quite match up to Usher’s U Got It Bad which for me seems to be, in terms of sound, pretty similar. Probably Brown’s best off F.A.M.E., though also a far cry from his best (for me, that would have to go to Say Goodbye). It’s very, very solid though.

OVERALL SCORE = 7.5 / 10
Up To You eschews Brown’s recent shifts towards rap and high-energy dance tracks, going with a more traditional R&B approach. For me, it works well. While there are a few small lyrical deficiencies, the message is a nice, positive one and the instrumentation works well to support the message, as does Brown’s singing. Please don’t remind me of the airplane, though.

Chris Brown ft. Busta Rhymes and Lil Wayne–Look At Me Now

Released February 01, 2011.
Billboard: #11
UK Charts: –

Posse raps can be interesting, as you get to hear a little slice of each individual’s style. For example, on the remix of Brown’s Deuces, from hearing their voice I could pick out Drake, TI, Kanye and Andre3000 easily without needing to see the list of featured artists. When I first saw the concept on paper – Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes, I figured it’d be an R&B track, possibly with some extended rap features. I was wrong.

However, I had heard him do a rap section (feature, actually) on Chipmunk’s Champion, in addition to his semi-shouting part on Yeah 3X; now I think about it actually quite a number of R&B singers are doing semi-crossovers (Trey Songz put his own take on Look At Me Now, and Ne-Yo opens One In A Million with some rapping). So I wasn’t too surprised…

Unlike Forever where all four of them had their strengths going for them, the aforementioned Deuces remix where all could be contenders, or perhaps even the depressingly weak yet somewhat egalitarian (bad) nature of Bedrock, this is one of the most one-sided ones I have ever seen, to put it bluntly.

#1 CHRIS BROWN

I don’t see how you can hate from outside of the club
You can’t even get in
Hahaha, leggo

Heh, the lyrics are obnoxious, as is the laugh. Anyway, that was just some random intro bit, so we should get down to the real content of his verse. I

Yellow model chick, yellow bottle sippin’
Yellow Lamborghini, yellow top missin’

Okay… This reminds me of Wiz Khalifa’s song about a car as well (Black And Yellow). Though my critical mind thinks Black And Yellow is bad as a song, I find it pretty catchy as harmless entertainment. The sheer ridiculousness of some parts of the song made it more humorous than anything – which may be a good thing.

That shit look like a toupee
I get what you get in 10 years, in two days

If I earned $10000 a month, I would get approximately $1.2 million in 10 years, not including bonuses. Let’s take the bonus as 1 month so that’s $1,320,000 in 10 years. In 2 days would mean that you earn… $241 million a year. True, that’s not impossible, but I believe that kind of level was surpassed only by Oprah for 2010. Even the top earning popstar, Beyonce clocked in at $87M, a little over one third of that. Pretty ambitious there, eh?

Ladies love me; I’m on my Cool J
If you get what I get, what would you say?
She wax it all off, Mr. Miyagi

No issues, no comments here.

And them suicide doors, hari-kari

LAZY rhyming. The term for suicide is hari kiri… Well, I guess it isn’t too bad that he gets his words on timing most of the time. 3.0 / 10

HOOK – CHRIS BROWN

Look at me now, look at me now
Oh, I’m getting paper
Look at me now, oh, look at me now
Yeah, fresher than a muff(??)

I can’t seem to hear the dirty word that this is supposed to end with. Anyway, could you sing something? At least I sort of liked his oversinging on Champion… He’s a singer first, a dancer up there as well, and a rapper maybe 20th. 4.0 / 10

#2 CHRIS BROWN

Lil nigga, bigger than gorilla
Cause I’m killing every nigga that can try to be on my shit
Better cuff your chick if you with her, I can get her
And she accidentally slip and fall on my dick

Heh, how incredulous (accidentally? It shouldn’t be exposed at all!). He’s trying a bunch of 16th note syllables here, and it’s at least kinda nice to listen to.

Oops, I said on my dick
I ain’t really mean to say on my dick
But since we talking about my dick
All of you haters say hi to it

Suck it, huh? As again, I somehow feel he’s not really trying at least in terms of lyric-writing here.

I’m done.

Well, I hope that was some fun experimentation, but please return to a main singing role in your songs. It wasn’t really terrible, but you can do much better. 4.0 / 10

#3 BUSTA RHYMES

Ayo Breezy, let me show you how to keep the dice rolling when you’re doing that thing over there homie

Yeah. He only did it for around four bars or so. Let’s do this!

Let’s GO!

I’m pumped. That sounds somewhat like Tinie Tempah’s signature before he starts his songs, though…

Cause I feel like I’m running
And I’m feeling like I gotta get away, get away, get away…

This is what I mean by fast. I remember in Forever that Eminem one-upped the others in terms of speed, rapping:

He’s wondering if he should spit this slow
Fuck no! Go for broke,
His cup just runneth over, oh no

You sure about this…? Forever was 158 BPM with a small bunch of 16th triplets. For the most part he’s just doing 8th notes at 158 BPM which a simple calculation would show to be 158 x 2 / 60,or around 5.27 syllables per second. Look At Me Now is only 146, but Busta goes mainly on the sixteenths. In other words, that is (146 x 4 / 60) or 9.73 syllables per second. Following the rappers on Forever would make for a somewhat hard song on DDR; but, Look At Me Now could easily be a boss song that would make Forever look like peanuts.

I’m not going to bother going through the lyrics. It’s fairly standard fare about pushing for the top in spite of haters, rebutting them, etc. Normally, songs that succeed for me do so on the intellectual level a la All of the Lights which I just wrote about; yet this is an example of serious technical proficiency. Good job. It’s the main part of the song which I can put on repeat. Heh looks like it’d be worth it for me to check out more of the guy’s work. This could be pop-slanted though relative to the rest of his work – somehow, like Raekwon’s verse on Runaway Love with Kanye West and Justin Bieber I get this feeling. Nevertheless, he’s very good. 8.0 / 10

Sheesh. This means the expectations are going to be VERY, VERY high for the next person up…

#4 LIL WAYNE

Man, fuck these bitch ass niggas, how y’all doin’?
I’m Lil Tunechi, I’m a nuisance, I go stupid, I go dumb like the Three Stooges
I don’t eat sushi, I’m the shit, no, I’m pollution, no substitution
Got a bitch that play in movies in my jacuzzi, pussy juicy

A porn star. I get it.

Seriously, most of this is also just standard fare about rising to the top and rebutting haters, so I don’t see much point in going through the lines. I’ll just point out the more interesting or uncertain bits.

You niggas ain’t eatin’, fuck it, tell a waiter
Marley said shoot ‘em, and I said okay
If you wanted bullshit then I’m like olé

Don’t quite get this bit. Who is Marley? I’ve heard it’s Wayne’s bodyguard, but still… isn’t this inappropriate especially given that he was just incarcerated for weapon possession?!

I don’t care what you say, so don’t even speak
Your girlfriend a freak like Cirque du Soleil

Ah ha! Like this. She must be a mad contortionist, probably. Nice one there.

Ciroc and Sprite on a private flight, bitch I been tight since Guiding Light

I learned that it (Guiding Light)’s apparently the longest running television drama (from 1975), and someone on rapgenius also commented that it could be a double entendre for God and Light. Nevertheless, going by this idea I don’t see a need for such reading anyway, since Guiding Light in and of itself, without changing the words, could also be an allusion to God, who was around since the beginning of time.

He isn’t bad. However, it’s hard to clear the bar that Busta set in his verse, and from what I see, Wayne doesn’t do it. Nevertheless, this is credibly okay. 5.5 / 10

And of course, the winner for me is Busta, hands down. Lil Wayne is good, but I think it’d be better if he throws in more of those interesting, witty couplets, or at least those that would make me smile amusedly. Brown should stick to singing, really.

OVERALL SCORE = 6.0 / 10
This is a rather unusual case where some elements of the song are excellent and others seem inherently flawed. I settled on a 6, as the hook while not good isn’t terrible, and the featured artists do their job more than satisfactorily (Lil Wayne), if not excellently (Busta). It’s pretty catchy, but probably could have been more cohesive if Brown used a more traditional pattern (e.g. Brown sings or raps v1, and sings the hook rather than just goes Look at me now, Look at me now. Wayne fires v2 and Busta does the bridge or vice versa). Nevertheless, I do respect Busta’s technical proficiency. I’d listen to the song for that part, really.

Chris Brown–Run It!

Released August 9, 2005 (US), 2006 worldwide
Billboard: Peaked at #1.
UK Charts: Peaked at #2.

This one’s a pretty fun dance song. Of course, the artist has undergone, to say the least, much controversy, and I didn’t really enjoy most of his recent works (I Can Transform Ya was barely tolerable, Deuces was decent but a sleeper and Yeah 3X just… isn’t my kind of thing). Nevertheless, much of his earlier songs are pretty good. His singing’s pretty decent, and Juelz Santana is entertaining, to say the least – which works, given the generally relaxed themes in this one.

The video is pretty much a collection of dance scenes in a gym, and it’s pretty nice and well-choreographed, with some nice solo parts. Bonus points for a blue cap, heh…

Lyrically, this one can be taken pretty much at face value. It’s basically Brown’s character well, asking a girl to show off her skills and “run it” which presumably implies dancing. The hook and the chorus, if pretty literal, are entertaining…

Is your man, on the floor?
If he ain’t, then let me know
Lemme see if you can run it (run it)
Girl indeed I can run it (run it)

Bonus points for being a nice guy, huh… Contrasts to Drake in Bedrock (Oh that was your girl? I though I recognised) – for some reason I thought of that as I wrote this. The little R&B tinged segment in the bridge is nice too… All in all, it’s a decent song, nothing too impressive about it though.

OVERALL SCORE = 6.0 / 10
Though it’s neither cerebral nor ground-breaking, Run It! is a fun and relaxed party/dance song that stays pretty clean and has rather good vocals and enjoyable raps on it. It’s decent.