(ThyBlackMan.com) Thousands of fans piled into Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., on Friday night to see onetime pariah Chris Brown’s F.A.M.E. tour, supporting his latest album of the same name (an acronym for the bewildering title “Forgiving All My Enemies“).
In a gray knit skully, camouflage shirt, cargo pants and boots, Brown, 22, sprung out of center stage to immediate squeals from the audience — opening with F.A.M.E.’s “Say It With Me.”
“Please don’t take my love away,” he croons on the hook. Lost, maintained and renewed love in relationships is a constant theme on his most recent songs. But 
the concept hits home even harder in relation to his career.
As if it’s necessary, in brief, here’s how Brown went from toothy teen pop star to hated outsider to unlikely hero. At 19 the R&B singer with two platinum albums assaulted his then-girlfriend, songstress Rihanna, in Los Angeles after a party on the eve of the 2009 Grammy Awards — seemingly damning the once golden boy into the abyss of soon-to-be-forgotten criminals. How would the kid recover from that?
Though he dodged jail time, his career didn’t recover so easily. Just months later, he’d drop an ill-received third album, Graffiti, which failed even to hit gold status. Then came his Fan Appreciation tour. In November 2009 Brown, an entertainer whose gifts had packed 15,000-plus-seat venues just a year prior, was relegated to puny ones. I attended the tour’s last show at New York City’s Best Buy (then Nokia) Theater. It was sold out. But at capacity, it held only a measly 2,000 people. And who attended?
His core audience of teen and 20-something blacks, mostly. The idea that we figure out who our real friends are during rough times proved to be true for Brown. Hardly present were the white faces that likely made him more than just an R&B singer and propelled him to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart before. But “we” stuck with him.
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