Chris Brown – Turn Up The Music

Beyond the unavoidable ethics of any kind of support for a Chris Brown track or the lamentable way in which Rihanna has teamed up with him for a remix of her track Birthday Cake, there’s a sense that there’s not much more to say about pop music’s arguably most sensational male artist right now. And that’s sensational for all the wrong reasons. We could write an essay about everything that’s wrong about the way he’s to a degree been taken back into the hearts of so many an average music fan (and those essays from other incensed writers have literally flooded the internet with vitriol for the bloke).

The first single to be taken from Brown’s Fortune album, Turn Up The Music is a predictable ‘sexy and you know it’ hashing out of traditional R&B/dance-pop cornerstones. It’s definitively the sound of ‘now’, but in the most weary of ways – it offers nothing not already heard on countless other tracks from Brown’s contemporaries, who benefit not only from doing it first, but for not being marred by a cloud of hatred.

In the days before the Brown ‘incident’, his music could even be appreciated as attractive. He represented a bright new talent on the scene. But now he is merely an automaton, continuing to exist only through sheer record label power. Turn The Music is the sound of that machine in full swing.

Turn Up The Music is released on the 26^th March.