Bobby Brown has accused Britney Spears of “butchering” one of his best-known songs, “My Prerogative”, when she covered it in 2004.
The pop star included it as a track on her Greatest Hits: My Prerogative album, released during a hiatus and interpreted by many as a way of addressing her global fame and media scrutiny at the time.
The cover was produced with Swedish songwriting and production duo Bloodshy & Avant; the original was released by Brown as a riposte following his firing from the R&B group New Edition.
Appearing on the Club Shay Shay podcast, Brown, 56, said he insisted on hearing the song any time an artist wanted to sample or cover one of his works.
“Yes, I gotta hear it,” he said, “because you don’t know what these kids will say these days. These kids will say some s*** that you don’t want your song associated with.”
Host Shannon Sharpe then asked if there had been an instance where he enjoyed another musician’s interpretation of one of his songs, but he struggled to think of one.
“I don’t think they really did justice to any of the samples that they have done to my songs,” he said.
“Britney Spears butchered ‘Prerogative,'” he said. “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.”
Riley did not, in fact, work on Spears’s version of “My Prerogative”, but he is credited as a writer along with Brown due to his role on the original track.
He had earlier named the song as his favourite out of all the songs he’d recorded, choosing it over other tracks such as “Mr Telephone Man” or “Candy Girl”, both by New Edition, and his solo song “Every Little Step”, from 1988’s Don’t Be Cruel.
“Because I wrote it for myself,” he said. “I wrote it as an anthem and as a theme to my lifestyle and what I was all about, and that’s basically the reason I think I’m still here 42 years later, is that I took what I felt about myself and I put it on wax.”
Brown has previously expressed his dislike of Spears’s cover, telling New York Magazine in 2005 that he loved the pop singer’s music videos, but little else.
“Why try to fix something that ain’t broke? That’s what I say,” he explained. “But I’m grateful someone covered a song of mine. The check wasn’t bad, either.”
He might be soothed by the fact that, while his song topped the charts in the US, Spears’s cover was less successful, appearing at No 4 on the US Billboard 200 and No 2 in the UK.
In 2022, Brown was the subject of the documentary Biography: Bobby Brown, which depicted his rise to fame, struggles with substance abuse, and his marriage and subsequent divorce from Whitney Houston.
