Bobby Brown is a national treasure. The pop star who started out in the legendary group New Edition with Ronnie (DeVoe), Ricky (Bell), Mike (Bivins), Ralph (Tresvant), and Johnny (Gill), too–and married Whitney Houston–is also the artist behind one of the most popular albums of the 1980s: 1988’s “Don’t Be Cruel.”
The album, which hit the top of the pop charts, sold over 10 million copies and is considered one of the greatest albums of all time. It placed five singles into the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1988 and 1989, including the chart-topper, “My Prerogative.”
Any album featuring a song that popular is bound to be both sampled and covered by various artists. One artist who covered Brown’s classic record, produced by Teddy Riley, was 2000s pop starlet, Britney Spears. And as it turns out, Bobby Brown hated her cover.
Brown, who recently sat down with Shannon Sharpe on his “Club Shay Shay” show, spoke candidly about artists who sampled his record and how the records get out to the world.
“Yes, I gotta hear it. Because you don’t know what these kids will say these days. These kids will say some sh– that you don’t want your song associated with,” Brown said, explaining why he requests to hear the songs that attempt to sample his records.
When asked specifically about covers of his song, “My Prerogative,” which likely both increased the use of the term in the Black community and sparked a decades-long debate about why it’s spelled ‘prerogative’ as opposed to ‘perogative,’ Brown hasn’t really enjoyed any of the covers.
“I don’t think they really did justice to any of the samples that they have done to my songs. Britney Spears butchered ‘Prerogative. Teddy Riley produced it, but that was a butchering that…I couldn’t take it. I cleared it only because it was Britney Spears and I was thinking… Teddy Riley is doing it too, so you know, but I felt it was a butchering.”
(As a point of note, Spears’ version was actually produced by producers Bloodshy & Avant; Teddy Riley produced the original version of the record.)
The full interview with Bobby Brown on “Club Shay Shay” is currently available on YouTube.
