R n’ B artist Chris Brown’s new single I Can Transform Ya, featuring Lil Wayne and Swizz Beatz has presented me with a bit of a conundrum. I’m a big Lil Wayne fan and would listen to pretty much anything produced by the borderline genius Swizz Beatz but the presence of Chris Brown has left me feeling uneasy and a tad guilty.

Despite selling shed-loads of records in the States Chris Brown is still something of an unknown quantity in Britain. In fact he is probably best known for assaulting his ex girlfriend, the singer Rhianna, and his subsequent sentencing to five years probation and six months community service. Anyone who saw the pictures of Rhianna following the incident and read the graphic accounts of the attack can be in no doubt that Brown subjected his former partner to a vicious assault and then, according to police reports, issued criminal threats to her after the fact. All of which makes him a pretty bad guy in my eyes. But by the same tack, should we try to forgive the perpetrators of such acts or hold them to task for the rest of their days? And should we try and separate an individual and their actions from the art they create?

During the course of doing a Sociology degree I interviewed former Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, people who had committed multiple murders and spent a significant portion of their lives behind bars. I found myself accepting that they had undoubtedly taken innocent lives, and ruined the lives of their victims families, but also realised that they had done their time and were now trying to deal with their crimes and positively contribute to their communities. In comparison to the murders carried out by these individuals the Chris Brown-Rhianna incident seems trivial, and that is not to suggest in any way that domestic abuse is a trivial matter. It is simply that if we can forgive our former prisoners and allow them to integrate back into society, surely we can do the same for perpetrators of domestic violence.

Another thing which I feel is worth remembering are the countless crimes and misdemeanours that the public forgive in much loved celebrities. Jimmy Page is well documented as having a 14 year old girlfriend at the height of Led Zeppelin’s fame. Tupac Shakur, a man who has been practically deified since his murder in 1996, was a convicted rapist. Whilst national treasure Sean Connery has been quoted as saying it is acceptable for a man to hit his wife, as long as it is an open handed slap.

And what of Swizz Beatz and Lil Wayne, are they guilty by association? If they are then we must also judge the likes of Danger Mouse and The Black Keys who were set to collaborate with Ike Turner shortly before his death, not to mention anyone who has worked with Ozzy Osbourne, a man who is on record as trying to kill his wife Sharon.

Even on a more personal level, if a friend of yours was to admit to you that they had hit their girlfriend would you instantly terminate the friendship, ostracising them and turning them into a social pariah? Or would you try and help them realise why what they did was wrong and offer them the necessary support to sort themselves out before their life went down the toilet? I would like to imagine I would do the latter. It’s that thought that is tempering my enjoyment of the really rather funky new Chris Brown single, which you can watch here.