Forgive Chris Brown?

Appearing on the Grammy Awards Sunday night, Brown performed and picked up a golden gramophone for best R&B album for his 2011 F.A.M.E. effort.

Brown’s appearance on the Grammys was considered controversial from the get go, not only because of his violent past but because Rihanna was already announced as appearing on the awards program.

By the time he won his own Grammy, the Twitterverse was already buzzing about Brown’s appearance. New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones called his presence on the show “one of the Grammys’ weirdest choices ever” while The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted, “I don’t look for the Grammys for moral clarity, but, really? Do the words ‘felony assault’ mean anything at all?”

But Brown also had his defenders, most notably Recording Academy president Neil Portnow and Grammy Awards producer Ken Ehrlich.

The day after the awards program, Portnow justified Brown’s appearance by saying the Grammys are all about the music and not what someone does outside the recording studio or on the concert stage.

“That’s really where the judgement comes from: music professionals listening to the music of other professionals,” Portnow said. “Clearly, our voting membership rated highly Chris’ musical work this past year.

“If we’re going to get in trying to personally evaluate artists in terms of their personal lives, that’s a slippery slope that we wouldn’t want to get into.”

Ehrilch also defended Brown’s appearance, telling Monday’s “CBS This Morning” that the signer “really deserved a second chance.”