Rihanna has defended her decision to collaborate with Chris Brown on two new songs, explaining he is simply "the hottest R&B artist out right now". Almost three years after Brown pleaded guilty to assaulting the singer, Rihanna claims to have put the matter behind her. "There shouldn't be a divide, you know?" she said. "It's music and it's innocent."
Despite this purported innocence, Rihanna and Brown have attracted controversy for their contributions to each other's songs. The remixes of Birthday Cake and Turn Up the Music are belligerent, sometimes raunchy affairs, without any hints of humility, forgiveness or regret. The two acts have been spotted together at social events since Brown's restraining order expired, and Rihanna says she simply wants to reunite their fans.
"We did two records," she told radio host Ryan Seacrest. "One for my fans, one for his fans, and that way our fans can come together … I reached out to him about doing Birthday Cake because that's the only person that really … it made sense to do the record. Just as a musician, despite everything else, that was going to be the person. You know I thought about rappers, and I've done that so many times, and the hottest R&B artist out right now is Chris Brown. So I wanted him on the track, and then in turn he was like 'Why don't you do the remix to my track?' and it was a trade-off."
In an interview last month, Birthday Cake's co-producer, The-Dream, said the decision to work with Brown was Rihanna's to make. "The same questions that went through my mind … had to have gone through hers," he told MTV. "I know she's not crazy. So my thought was, 'You've been thinking about this, you've already thought it out, so evidently you know what reaction you gonna get'."
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