Running With It

Brown's staggeringly successful launch ratcheted up the buzz that the kid may be the next Usher, if not the next King of Pop, and landed him a show-closing radio festival slot at sold-out Madison Square Garden.

There was also the near-instant gold certification of Brown's eponymous PG-rated debut album, which has sold 586,000 copies in less than a month, according to Nielsen SoundScan. And his second single, "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)," has made a quick dash out of the gates.

Not bad for a guy who might otherwise have spent his winter break hanging out with friends and family in Tappahannock, whose residents -- all 2,000 or so of them -- couldn't even fill the lower bowl at MCI Center, where Brown arrives tonight with the Holladay Jam tour, a youthful R&B/hip-hop caravan also starring the likes of Ciara, Bow Wow and Omarion.

"The album is doing incredibly," Brown says softly. "I'm surprised. I never thought it was going to take off this quick."

Indeed, he's something of a celebrity cliche come to life, an as-seen-on-MTV character who lost the ability to blend almost overnight: Brown, who moved to New Jersey this year with his mother (his parents are divorced) to be closer to the nerve center of the music industry, says he went shopping for Christmas presents back in Virginia and had to flee the mall with a security escort.

"People were trying to run up and grab me," he says. "I didn't want to be rude, but the whole mall was following me."

Still, he says, almost robotically, as if reciting from a script, nothing's changed (even if everything has).

"My personal life is the same," he says. "At the end of the day, this is just a job. I love what I do, and it's a great job. But it's like my alter ego. There's Chris Brown the singer. And there's Christopher Brown, the down-home Tappahannock boy that plays video games and basketball and hangs out."

But Chris Brown the singer isn't just any singer. He's the sort of singer whose rare combination of talent (vocally and as a dancer), charisma and teen-idol looks makes label executives weak in the knees and inspires folks around the industry to crank the hyperbole up to 11.

Paul "Cubby" Bryant, music director of the Top 40 New York radio station Z100, says Brown "has massive crossover appeal that goes beyond the urban audience. To be a star, you need the songs and you need a look. . . . He'll be here to stay, with plenty of hits. I'm seeing the same thing from him that I saw when Usher first came out."

As are Andre Harris and Vidal Davis, who are in a pretty good position to know. The songwriting-production duo, known as Dre and Vidal, have made hit records with Usher, perhaps the most successful male R&B performer since Michael Jackson. Jackson, too, has worked with Dre and Vidal, as have Ciara, Destiny's Child, Jill Scott, Amerie, Alicia Keys -- and now Chris Brown, whose second single, "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)," is a Dre and Vidal production.

"He's got it; he's the new wave," Harris says. "And he hasn't even fully tapped his potential. When he does, it's going to be ridiculous."