How Chris Brown can get his career back in order

Chris Brown is gradually bending to my point of view, it's just that the TIs won't allow him to. No homo.

If his label would have employed me in A&R capacity, I could have told him way back when to not bother performing at Oprah Winfrey's rape dungeon/school for girls who don't have iPods in South Africa. (As if there's anywhere to charge an iPod in South Africa.) When it came time for Oprah to do Chris Brown a solid, she was nowhere to be found. She dedicated an entire show to making him out to be some sort of monster, when he told you, in that video he did with Lil Bow Wow, that he isn't. (Don't make him have to tell you twice.) It stands to reason that, if Oprah really gave a shit about preventing domestic violence, she'd invite Chris Brown onto her show and have Dr. Phil or somebody talk to him, but that's the thing. Oprah is much more concerned with throwing a black man under a bus.

Similarly, Chris Brown tripped in letting the TIs delete his Twitter account. I read just now, on Sandra Rose, that GQ had the sheer balls to ask Rihanna if she really has herpes. (I'd like to see one of these rap magazines try some shit like that.) You'll recall that, in the weeks leading up to the Rumble in the Lambo, Rihanna was pictured walking around with a nasty cold sore on her lip, as if she'd gotten the special $40 lap dance over at PT's in Sauget, and I speculated, in a post on this site, that she may have given Chris Brown the herp, and that's why he had to put his shoe on her. Which, technically, would have made the Rumble in the Lambo an act of retaliation. Isn't knowingly giving someone the herp considered an assault, legally? Chris Brown could have brought that up in court and had his case tossed out. Or is that the real reason he got away with picking up trash along the highway? Which is symbolic, if you think about it.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I might ask Chris Brown, via Twitter, if those herpes rumors were true. But I couldn't, because the TIs had Chris Brown's Twitter account deleted this weekend. Breezy, probably concerned with projections that his new album Graffiti would only do Gucci Mane numbers, went to a Wal-Mart out in Connecticut somewhere to make sure they had it in stock. When he couldn't find it, he went apeshit on the manager, then he wrote about it on Twitter. Having worked in places like that my entire adult life now, where my job is essentially to absorb verbal abuse from irate mouth breathers trying to steal shit, it's a trip to think of an artist pulling some shit like that. When I used to work at K-Mart, we sold a shedload of copies of that Nelly album Suit. Imagine if Nelly, who apparently lives around the corner from there, showed up wanting to know why no one was buying sweat. My job there was basically Black Person Wrangler. A woman would stand out in the aisle and direct black people into my line, so there'd be less likelihood of an incident. Then once a day I'd have to go back to the break room and physically escort the two ign'ant black chicks who worked there back to their registers, because at some point or another they'd realized that you couldn't get fired for taking 45 minute lunch breaks every day of the week, you just wouldn't get a raise, and no one got a raise there anyway. As with Chris Brown on Oprah, the way those bitches treated me gives the lie to the idea that intergender abuse in the black community is typically of the man-on-woman variety.

But I digress.

Now, where was I? Ah yes, Chris Brown's Twitter. No fishsticks. Here's the thing: If Chris Brown didn't vent on Twitter, didn't give Vibe the graphic description of the Rumble in the Lambo I would have appreciated, and groveled at Oprah's swollen, probably gout-ridden feet, and it didn't do his album sales any good, maybe it's time for a different approach. I don't know if he's read my posts, but Chris Brown must realize this himself, hence the incident at Wal-Mart. Did a Wal-Mart in motherfucking Connecticut really sell out of a Chris Brown album, or did they just tell him that to get him to vacate the premises? As perhaps America's foremost expert on dealing with black people in a retail setting (I might write an article on it for the Harvard Business Review), I'm gonna have to suggest the latter. Chris Brown was right. Now all he needs is the courage to trust his instincts. Unless they involve beating the crap out of a woman, in which case he should probably just gorge himself on alcohol, rub one out and call it an evening. He really should holler at your boy. I've got a lot of good advice.