Don’t blame Rihanna for the Drake-Chris Brown debacle

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I can’t say that I’m particularly upset about Chris Brown’s chin injury. The singer continues to make headlines for everything but his music, though he claims to want to move on from the 2009 incident that forever changed his public image, when he viciously beat then girlfriend and fellow pop star Rihanna after the Grammy awards ceremony. He’s been courting trouble ever since.

And I can’t say that I care whether Drake started the altercation between the two that resulted in Brown’s injury and that of five other people in a New York City nightclub. The Canadian hip-hop star has coasted on his “nice guy” appeal for much of his career, boasting a certain sensitivity mostly absent from other rapper’s music that has allowed him to go unpunished for some of his most misogynistic lyrics and antics. In the most perfect karmic sense, they both got what was coming to them.

No arrests have been made, but what has been confirmed is that Brown and members of his entourage were engaged in a physical confrontation with members of Drake’s camp in a Manhattan nightclub. A representative for Drake says the rapper was on his way out of the club at the time of the brawl and is not responsible for the dust up. The reasons for the fight have not been confirmed.

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Early rumors stated that Brown sent Drake a bottle of champagne, an attempt at breaking the tension between the two young stars, and Drake responded by sending back a note that said, “I’m still f**king the love of your life.”

Which brings us back to Rihanna. Whether the above story is true or not, both Drake and Brown have a history with the chart-topping singer. Rihanna was rumored to have dated Drake in the aftermath of the abuse she received from Brown. Years after the fact, Drake and Brown engaged in an explicit Twitter war that found them making rather disparaging remarks about Rihanna and her sexual frankness. Now, it has escalated to the point of actual fisticuffs. Well, bottle-cuffs.

This entire sordid affair and dysfunctional “love” triangle has little to do with Rihanna, in this writer’s opinion. This is the result of male egos clashing in the most public of ways. Years after either one has been involved with Rihanna, these two knuckleheads still feel some type of ownership over her. They feel some need to prove to themselves and the world their worth as men by way of lording over the sexual choices that Rihanna makes, as if they aren’t independent of anything they have ever said or done.

There is nothing but macho posturing and masked insecurity running through this entire ordeal, yet I know that somehow, some way, people will find reason to point to Rihanna as the source of confrontation. Really, this is just the inevitable result of two young men operating as if their fame, fortune, and male genitalia have bestowed upon them nobility and special dominion over all people and objects, where the line between people and objects is continually blurred.