It’s always the same story, the difficult separation between the art and the artist: Chad Taylor, a music writer for Iowa local paper City View, could not do it, and, as a result, got a lot of positive reactions from different new outlets.
As you can see, he wrote ‘Chris Brown hits women. Enough said’ as a review of Brown’s latest album ‘Fortune’, and this news clip was reposted by NME, Spinner and elsewhere, presented as an example of brave journalism. NME wrote ‘Round of applause for Chad Taylor’, and endless discussions have followed between Brown’s fans and Brown’s haters on the various blogs where this was reposted.
So was he right to do this? Doesn’t it bring more attention on Chris Brown and give more reason for his fans to be more enraged by the situation? Let’s be clear, I am not one of these persons who say we should forgive Brown, his action was despicable and he is a piece of shit for having no remorse at all, but as a music critic, does this make sense?
Chris Brown did not kill Rihanna, but what happens when there is murder? There was a similar example of domestic violence which turned deadly in France, when Bertrand Cantat, the frontman of the very successful rock band Noir Désir, hit his girlfriend Marie Trintignant 19 times in the face (she was French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant’s daughter) in 2003. She died, and he went to jail but was released on parole in 2007, and resumed his musical career in 2010 with a very positive reception from his audience!
We will always be divided around stories like these ones. Most fans find a way to totally separate the artist from the music, other ones have some difficulties, but if you are not a fan in the first place, it becomes almost impossible to accept such a behavior from an artist. I suspect Chad Taylor was not a Brown’s fan to start with, he even tweeted, talking about the album, ‘I got it for free and it wasn't worth the price’. I was not a fan of the music either, and will definitively never be one.