Bobby Brown didn’t need permission to make his own decisions, but it seems he regrets this one.
Two decades after Britney Spears released her cover of his 1988 song “My Prerogative” with the help of his co-writer Teddy Riley in 2004, the Grammy winner shared his thoughts on the track.
“Britney Spears butchered ‘My Prerogative,'” Bobby told Shannon Sharpe on the April 16 episode of the Club Shay Shay podcast. “Teddy Riley produced it, but that was a butchering. I couldn’t take it.”
“I cleared it only because it was Britney Spears,” he continued, adding that he felt secure in the decision since Teddy was a major part of the OG version.
Britney’s team declined to comment.
But for the New Edition member, it appears that there aren’t any covers of his songs that have impressed him yet. As he bluntly put it, “I don’t think they really did justice to any of the samples that they have done to my songs.”
The “Can You Stand the Rain” singer admitted that he’s become more cautious with clearing his songs since then.
“I gotta hear it because you don’t know what these kids will say these days,” he said of his process moving forward. “These kids say some s–t that you don’t want your song associated with it.”
As for how Bobby came up with his own musical style?
“I was fearless,” he recalled. “I had nobody to look at in competition with…All I was trying to do was be the best artist I could be.”
He revealed that he looked at Michael Jackson, Prince, Rick James and Stevie Wonder and “tried to be what all of them were not. That became Bobby Brown.”
Bobby—who married Alicia Etheredge in 2012, five years after his divorce from Whitney Houston was finalized—has proven he learned quite a bit since he developed his own persona over 40 years ago. In fact, he previously revealed his secret to his long-term success.
“Keep giving good music,” Bobby told Billboard in 2018. “It’s not a business anymore. It’s about who does the best music, so I like to go in the studio and make the best music I can possibly make. And if it’s not good enough, then I won’t put it out.”
