The young singer, Brown, is learning some quick and dirty lessons about how your personal life can destroy a multi-million dollar brand. I have never met Chris personally, but I know people who know people who are inside the Chris Brown camp (I don't enjoy mingling with celebrities too much, since they don't usually make the best of friends). I recall hearing stories about how hard Chris and his original handlers had to work to get even the smallest magazine to interview him when his career first began (it always starts out this way). I then recall seeing his career shoot off like a rocket, as his first album went double platinum, selling over two million copies in the U.S. and a total of three million copies world-wide. His image was so perfect that he was singing along with characters like Elmo from Sesame Street, and somehow finding a way to make it look cool. To this day, my youngest daughter has nothing but Chris Brown posters on her wall and she refuses to believe that Chris Brown hit anyone (we still debate about that).


Chris was a bona fide superstar, and sometimes with stardom comes a hard head and hard lessons. I partially defended Chris Brown on CNN last year , attempting to remind the world that Chris is not a monster. Instead, Chris is a young man who made a serious mistake. Mind you, we must take domestic violence very seriously here in America, but I am also hopeful that Chris can find redemption. If he simply learns that a man has no right to put his hands on a woman, then he'll be just fine. Rihanna and other woman can also learn that accepting or inducing violence by attacking a man has no place in a relationship as well. Rihanna didn't deserve what she got from Chris, but if she hit him first (as some have tried to say), then she was wrong.



With Chris' rise came a brand that he and others thought could never be tainted. He was right there with Tiger Woods and Britney Spears, two other celebrities with seemingly perfect images, who later found out that even the tallest of us can fall to the ground. Like Tiger and Britney, Chris soon realized that the troubles in his personal life can spillover to ruin millions of dollars of hard work, ultimately causing a massive loss of both wealth and jobs. Chris' latest album, 'Graffiti,' has been considered a flop relative to what Chris might have sold before the Rihanna incident took place.

What is also interesting is that there are some celebrities, like Charlie Sheen, Lil Wayne and others, who can commit one crime after another and only seem to get bigger movie deals and greater opportunities. Perhaps this differential is due to the style of brand the celeb has created. Unlike Brown, Spears and Woods, who created "goody two-shoes" images, Sheen and Weezy are quick to tell everyone that they are not interested in being role models. If you recall, Britney Spears was a favorite of every teen girl in America, and was enslaved by a public perception that simply couldn't be maintained. The same is true for Tiger Woods, who used aggressive tactics to keep the media from finding out that he was anything less than perfect. Perhaps the lesson in all this is that building a brand that doesn't match the personality of the celebrity is simply not a good idea.

People know about my writing, but I do not consider myself to be a famous man. One thing I've always wanted is to be as real as I could be, so the world understands, from the very beginning, that I am no better or worse than anyone else. I never wanted to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show as some kind of hero to soccer moms everywhere, and I didn't want people to think I was perfect. The only thing worse than not having a lot of money is to have a lot of money and lose it. That's exactly what can happen when you get rich pretending to be something you're not. Chris Brown will eventually find success, but most importantly, he must find redemption within his soul. The financial lessons from his mistake have been huge, and they will probably continue into the future.

Below, fellow BV writer, Lola Adesioye and I discuss Chris Brown's ban, and what this could mean for his career. Lola is actually from England, so the conversation is quite interesting. Enjoy!




Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.