Bobby Brown: A $500 VCR Payout, New Jack Swing and a $400,000 Ransom

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Bobby Brown grew up one of eight children in Boston's Orchard Park projects, and at age three he watched James Brown perform live. After singing in church choirs, he formed New Edition around 1980 with Michael Bivins, Ricky Bell, and later Ralph Tresvant and Ronnie DeVoe. The group sold millions of records and topped charts in the UK and New Zealand, yet Brown says he received about $500 and a VCR for that early run. Rebelling against the clean-cut image by breaking choreography and singing out of turn, he was out of the group by the mid-1980s.

His 1986 solo debut made little impact, but his 1988 second album, built with Teddy Riley, Babyface and L.A. Reid, helped define New Jack Swing by laying gospel and R&B harmonies over swung TR-808 hip-hop drums. At 19 he became the youngest male artist to top the Billboard 200 with a studio album, selling 12 million copies. His 1992 marriage to Whitney Houston, a 2005 Bravo reality series and their 2007 divorce followed. Brown later said a Catholic priest sexually abused him as a child, and he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 32.

The second album was the best-selling album of 1989 in the U.S. and won a Grammy.
A 120-day world tour brought on-stage antics that drew trouble with local police.
In 1993 a New York street gang kidnapped him over a $25,000 drug debt, and Houston paid a $400,000 ransom that was never reported.
He survived a 1995 drive-by shooting that killed his sister's boyfriend beside him.
He lost Houston in 2012, daughter Bobbi Kristina in 2015 and son Bobby Jr. in 2020, and rejoined New Edition for the 2022 Culture Tour.

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