Running With It
At 16, R&B Singer Chris Brown Has Galloped to the Top of the Charts

By J. Freedom du Lac
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 29, 2005

PHILADELPHIA

A No. 1 pop single is not served a la carte. It comes with stuff, as music phenom Chris Brown recently discovered.

Hordes of squealing fans, for instance. A bejeweled Charlie Brown pendant. The cover of Vibe magazine. And an entourage that includes a Yale-educated tutor, road manager, career manager, manager's assistant, a spaniel wearing a knitted wool sweater and two bodyguards -- each roughly the size of Tappahannock, Va., the tiny town where Chris Brown grew up.

But a No. 1 single does not come with this: a sleek new Range Rover.

Not even when it's a No. 1 single that catapults a 16-year-old R&B newbie into the rarefied air atop the Billboard chart, as with Brown's "Run It!"

For that, you need approval from the person who really runs it: Your mother. And Chris Brown's mother had another, more sensible idea when her son said he really wanted a Range Rover.

"He got a Ford Expedition," Joyce Hawkins says with a shrug. "It was a business decision."

Hawkins is dishing in the bowels of the Wachovia Spectrum, where her sudden-teen-idol son has just performed a 15-minute set of songs about girls before thousands of underage female fans, many of whom appeared on the verge of hysteria when Brown bounded onto the stage and flashed his devastating smile in their general direction.

At one point during the show, while singing the slow jam "Ya Man Ain't Me" in his high-register voice, Brown mocked said "man" by noting that the guy can't even drive. Here, now, is the kicker, provided backstage by Hawkins: Her son doesn't have a license.

"He can't drive, so it wasn't going to make a difference," she says of the decision to buy the more reasonably priced of the two SUVs. But, she adds, "at least I get to drive him around in it."

Welcome to the glamorous life of pop music's hottest newcomer!

This is Chris Brown's world after his chart-topping, crunkish hit "Run It!" (produced by A-list hip-hop beatmaker Scott Storch) climbed past the Mariahs, Kanyes and Nickelbacks of the world.

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."

Says Davis: "He's a good songwriter already, and he's got a voice. Plus he can dance. He's a triple threat."

Brown's manager, Tina Davis, is thinking even bigger.

Davis came across Brown more than a year ago the old-fashioned way: The kid who used to sing in a church choir had been kicking around Tappahannock, about 100 miles due south of Washington, with some local producers, who knew some people who knew some people who got Def Jam's attention. Davis was a senior A&R executive at Def Jam at the time. She loved what she heard and saw, and was about to sign Brown to the label when she lost her job. So she became Brown's manager a day later. And within a week, Brown had a deal with Jive Records, the label that launched the careers of Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, among others. That was last December.

Now, with a straight face, Davis says Brown might be "the biggest thing since Michael Jackson."

For his part, Brown kinda, you know, wishes the comparisons would just go away already.

Especially the ones to Usher, which have become de rigueur. (To wit: A recent People magazine headline says, simply: "Is He the Next Usher?")

"I'm not gonna say that I hate it, because I really respect Usher and I was influenced by him," says Brown, who used to perform Usher's "My Way" in the mirror at home. "But so many people compare me to him, and I don't think it'll ever stop. I just want to be my own artist."

Even so, Brown's show begins with a flashy entrance set to Jackson's "Thriller" -- the obvious insinuation being that it's time to get that old King of Pop throne warm.

Onstage he's charismatic and kinetic, popping, locking, twirling, high-stepping, constantly moving, even when he serenades two young girls picked from the audience. He performs a half-dozen songs, which is more accurate than saying he sings them, since he lets the crowd carry some of the lyrics while he dances. (It's worth noting, though, that Brown doesn't once lip-sync and that his stage voice is basically the same as his studio voice, which is to say that he sounds like a cross between Tevin Campbell and New Edition's Ralph Tresvant. Or, for those seeking more recent data points, a young Justin Timberlake.)

The crowd whips itself into a frenzy when Brown launches into "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)" and even more so when he follows that up with "Run It!" At some point, you figure, the audience's collective breath will run out. The screaming will stop. It never does. Thriller, indeed.

But one hit single and another seemingly on the way do not a new king make. And besides, there's nothing royal about Brown's surroundings right now.

He is holed up, post-show, in a bare-bones wedge of a dressing room that can't be more than 10 feet by 20 feet. It is furnished with a pleather couch, two metal-backed leather stools and a low-definition television set tuned to some sort of prime-time network drama.

There is nothing resembling a lavish meal spread: just a pot of steaming water, a few lemon wedges, an assortment of teas, some bottled water and a few Jolly Ranchers, plus a bag of potato chips that Brown is inhaling between sips from a can of Coke. This represents his dinner, much to his mother's dismay.

To review the night's performance, Brown huddles with his dancers over a video camera, all of them looking for slip-ups on the tiny playback screen. He then dashes off for a live radio interview, ducks into Bow Wow's dressing room for a chat, then spends about 30 minutes signing autographs for young girls, who leave with personalized signatures (to Alicia, to Nikki, to Charlotte, etc.) on 8-by-10 photos, each of them enhanced by the hearts hand-drawn by Brown. Throughout the autograph session, "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)" plays on an endless loop, with Brown singing along to himself.

When he's done, he jumps out of his seat and dances his way down the hall, back to the tiny room, where he's now bouncing off the walls. He can't stand still, apparently. "He's like this 24/7," his mother says. "He just has so much energy."

Which is good, says manager Davis, because, along with everything else, a No. 1 pop single is traditionally served with a heaping side order of increased expectations.

"Just because his album went gold in a month and his single hit No. 1 doesn't mean he can stop grinding and pounding the pavement," she says. "There's a lot of work to do."