Mason Says

Few people enjoy a life that’s unvisited by setbacks and adversity. Bad times befall the best of us. Straight talk, sh*t happens. It’s a thread that’s woven into our existence that makes us human versions of inventory found at TJ Maxx; we’re all a bit irregular in some form or fashion. Most of us, however, toil in obscurity with not as much as our next door neighbor knowing our issues. But for celebrities, which I use loosely, it’s a different ball game – lives and careers have an interesting way of coming off the tracks that often makes a farce of fame and fortune that once was.
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Continued: Add YouTube and reality television to the mix and one’s dignity can descend at a rapid refund type of rate. Over the past week, I’ve been acutely reminded of this phenomenon via two male R&B artists, who other than their meteoric fall from the charts, actually couldn’t be more different.

In one corner, sporting an unmanaged mohawk and a surplus of flab around his waist is former R&B superstar Bobby Brown – now a contestant on VH-1’s Celebrity Fit Club. In the other corner, “donning” a disheveled off-the-rack suit and drinking a bottle of Budweiser is former Quincy Jones’ protégé Tevin Campbell – now starring in a series of YouTube videos shot in what’s plausibly Toronto’s Chinatown . This can’t be good for either one of them.

Look, I’ve never walked in their shoes, but I can’t help but think that one knows that his pre-millennium R&B career has irreversibly careened off course when he finds himself on Celebrity Fit Club or singing his trio of hits in some nondescript Chinatown cabaret.

Personally, I’m a Chinatown connoisseur. If a city has one, I’m there. However, if your name is Tevin Campbell and you were groomed and produced by the legendary Quincy Jones, who once touted you as the next Michael Jackson, things have gone terribly wrong when you pick up your Blackberry Pearl to learn your manager has just booked you for a gig in the dance hall right right above the Hong Shing Chinese Restaurant. And you know it’s bad when a guy, presumably returning from the restroom, cuts across the stage right in front of Tevin to make his way back to the floor, while Tevin continues to talk to the crowd as if his career isn’t in a complete freefall at that moment. But things don’t get much better, when Tevin, scraggly beard and all, takes a swig from his bottle of ripple Budweiser, in the middle of the song. Yep, nothing suggests the next Michael Jackson as does taking a gulp of Budweiser, to the head, between lyrics.

Note: Patron cuts in front of him few seconds in. Chugs beer @ 2:40 in.

See first few seconds of video below for the sea of young Asian faces.

Not to be outdone in absurdity, however, is Bobby Brown, the former self-proclaimed “King of R&B”. Obviously, Bobby’s life has been, shall we say, a lot more colorful than Tevin’s more tepid existence. So unsurprisingly, Bobby, the undisputed “Celebrity Champ of Sh*t Gone Wrong”, retains his title in this match-up against his much younger foe by offering the most egregious misstep of the two. It's as if Bobby is saying “step out the way youngin’ and let me show you how a grown ass man circles the drain”. Seriously, subjecting himself to a show co-starring Kevin Federline and a drill sergeant named Harvey, who in a full-throated manner, barks one liners like "move your flabby asses and go to the mess hall to get some chow”, is a blinking neon sign that the career is not headed in an upward trajectory. It’s clear that Bobby has gotten real cozy with the desperation of doing almost anything for money. He has to be when in the premier episode Harvey, the drill sergeant, is bragging about a training program that’s used by Marines, Navy Seals and – wait for it – “Vikings”. Not as in the football team, but as in the actual Scandinavian dudes, who raided and colonized parts of Europe in the eleventh century – thooooose Vikings. This is what it’s come down to for Bobby Brown. But what I can’t figure out is how the decision was made, other than a coin toss, whether to cast Bobby for Celebrity Fit Club or Celebrity Rehab, another one of Vh-1’s train wrecks.

What I know for sure is a series of bad breaks and bad decisions have absconded with the self-respect these two, Bobby and Tevin, once had. It’s a damn shame. One