The last half-decade has been a transitional one for contemporary R&B. One of the dominant...

Not even a generous helping of Lil Wayne can save the racket-laden new Chris Brown single, "I Can Transform Ya." Coming off the whole "furiously beating one of the world's biggest pop starlets" thing, you would think that Brown would opt for a song... I don't know, maybe a little bit less angry. It's nice to see that he still hasn't lost his penchant for cross-promotion, though. The song sounds li...

A great day for new song leaks. First Method Man and Redman drop a long overdue new song, and it sounds like it was preserved in amber from 2000 (in a good way), and then Ghostface of all people emerges with a song that addresses the Rihanna/Chris Brown debackle. With unusual earnestness but no undue sentimentality, Ghostface shows his support for victimized women, including the pop star, encourag...

I still vividly remember the time a decade ago when some friends accidentally pulled up a grotesque photo of the Chris Farley's corpse when doing an innocuous web search for the comedian. It was the day I realized that the Internet is fundamentally evil. It's in the spirit of of that crime scene photo that yesterday TMZ, a tabloid site notable for how it covers celebrities no...

First Wrigley gum dropped Chris Brown's promotional campaign yesterday, now the Milk Campaign has pulled Brown's "Got Milk" ads. But more troubling for the R&B singer: Radio stations have stopped playing his music, too. I called Kiss FM to ask about the absence of Brown from the station's playlists this afternoon and a DJ confirmed "he's done for now." (Rihanna is still in regular rot...

Though the guy makes great summertime singles, Chris Brown has always seemed a fairly unlikable guy�kind of like a moody, faux-thuggish Nelly, without the wholesome core. Something about his omni-furrowed brow invites comparisons to the worst of the R&B singers from the New Jack Swing days, those who trumpeted their masculinity via crotch grabs and aggressive, take-what-I-want glares at sexual co...