Chris Brown says company named after him isn't about him

Let's take a moment to look beyond the fact that Chris Brown is a thuggish perpetrator of domestic violence who a lot of people seem keen to give a free pass to, and spend some time examining another way he sucks, shall we?

He's got his own vanity label, you know. It's called CBE, which means Chris Brown Entertainment.

But, hey, don't focus on Chris Brown here. That would be wrong:

"I don't even like to say, 'Yo, they're my artists,' " Brown told [MTV] of Sevyn Streeter, pop singer Sabrina Antoinette and rock band U.G.L.Y. "Most of the time you get stuck in a box where people don't give them a shot because they're getting co-signed by another artist. For me all the artists that are signed under me — or that are working with me — are phenomenal."

These are just acts that he says he loves - which is bad news for them, as Brown has a track record of beating to a bloody pulp people he claims to love.

It's curious, isn't it, being worried about the artists on your label being pegged as pets of that artist, and yet naming the label they've been signed to with your own name.

It might be a mixed message.

Ah, but Chris Brown has thought about that. He suggests CBE could mean other things as well:

The label's acronym breaks down to Chris Brown Entertainment, but the multiplatinum singer doesn't want to make it all about him so he has come up with two other meanings behind his imprint: Culture Beyond Your Evolution and/or Culture Beyond Your Experience.

Hang on a moment, though. Unless I'm mistaken, don't both those come out as CBYE?

Brown seems to think his illiterate wordplay is part of a continuum related to his genius:

"I always use the metaphors and the different meanings. I like to be weird like that," he said.

There's nothing weird about using metaphors.

There might be something weird about not knowing the difference between reversing out a new meaning for an abbreviation and a metaphor, though.