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The Uncanceling of Chris Brown
New York magazine
|October 6-19, 2025
The singer claims he's been overlooked, but his blockbuster stadium tour suggests otherwise.
THE SKIES OVER Toronto's Rogers Stadium on a late-August night exploded ahead of “Take You Down,” the bedroom banger from 36-year-old R&B superstar Chris Brown's 2007 sophomore album, Exclusive, soaking every standing surface. When he belted, “Oh, girl, I love the way you sound when you rain on me,” during the apocalyptically horny “2012,” the mic was dripping. But a downpour didn’t stop the singer from ascending into the air in a harness and moonwalking during “Look at Me Now.” Breezy Bowl XX, the tour marking 20 years since Brown's debut, makes an unsubtle case for the singer as a pivotal force in R&B, hip-hop, and pop by barreling through dozens of disparate highlights. It answers the hypothetical What if Chris Brown headlined the Super Bowl, mesh football jerseys and all? It thrives on extracting an awestruck How did he do that?!
With a Spotify monthly listener count nearing 60 million—in the same ballpark as Beyoncé and Lana Del Rey—Brown feels as inescapable an artist as he ever was. But his grizzled, perseverant energy onstage hardens online, where the singer has stressed that he’s a media outcast.
This story is from the October 6-19, 2025 edition of New York magazine.
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