Bobby Brown is keeping it all the way real about the hatchet job pop star Britney Spears did to his classic hit “My Prerogative” when she covered it more than two decades ago. During the latest episode of Shannon Sharpe’s
Club Shay Shay, the New Edition alumn was asked if he would “need to hear” a song that included a sample of his music before he would clear the sample.
“Yes, I got to hear it. Gotta hear it,” Brown said. “Because you don’t know what these kids will say these days. These kids will say some sh-t that you know you don’t want your song associated with.”
Sharpe asked Brown for an example of a sample of his son that he did like, to which he basically said none of these artists who have sampled or covered his work have done him any justice. That’s when he pivoted to Spears, who, in 2004, covered Brown’s hit single from his sophomore album,
Don’t Be Cruel. (Which is almost universally considered his best work, and anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong, no matter how subjective art is.)
“Britney Spears butchered ‘Prerogative.’
Teddy Riley produced it, but that was a butchering that, you know… I couldn’t take it,” Brown said.
Now, let’s keep it a buck about one thing: No melanin-rich person grew up in the ’80s and ’90s and would even dare to argue Spears’ version of “My Prerogative” is better than the OG. However, social media is far more split than one might expect in response to the “Every Little Step” singer’s rebuke of Spears’ cover. Although, as long as we’re keeping it completely real, the vast majority of the people backing Britney on this have
qu-white the interesting thing in common, and many of those people have had the audacity to argue Spears’ cover made the original song and its artist “relevant.” (Yes, they went there. No, those people have never even caught a whiff of the cookout, let alone been invited.)
Check out some of the reactions below.
