It is not just turn-of-the-millennium nostalgia.
#BRANDY BARBIE DOLL FULL#
It also arrives at the perfect time: the 41-year-old is now feted as a massive influence on modern R&B, with 2002’s glitchy, UK garage-influenced Full Moon and 2004’s sumptuous Afrodisiac – lauded by everyone from Rihanna to Red Hot Chili Peppers’s John Frusciante – both hailed as canon. The good news is that the soulful B7 – her first album in eight years – sounds like the work of an artist re-energised, with those trademark vocal flexes cocooned in outre production and playful throwback moments such as lead single Baby Mama’s celebration of her 18-year-old daughter, Sy’rai. I don’t ever want to get to a point where I’m doing music for the wrong reasons.”īaby doll. “Sometimes you get caught up in being popular and relevant, and that makes you lose the reason why you’re connected to music,” she says. While subsequent albums showed flashes of brilliance, they were often undermined by her rocky relationship with music itself. In 2006, she was involved in a fatal road accident (a topic very much off the table during our interview) that forced her to quit as a judge on America’s Got Talent. While there were other hits – Have You Ever, What About Us?, Talk About Our Love – by 2005 Brandy’s commercial appeal had stalled. “A black Barbie with braids and little baby hairs coming out,” she smiles. A year later, now one of the biggest pop stars in the world, Brandy was given her own line of Barbie dolls. Its opulent sound – fluttering harps, cascading backing vocals, elasticated bass – rewired the genre, with its then-unknown co-producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins and co-writer LaShawn Daniels going on to craft era-defining hits for the likes of Destiny’s Child, Jennifer Lopez and Houston herself. A playfully confrontational duet with fellow R&B upstart Monica, it spent 13 weeks at No 1 in the US, finishing as the year’s best-selling single. Her second album, 1998’s Never Say Never, sold 16m copies worldwide, thanks in part to its lead single The Boy Is Mine.
Photograph: Everett/Alamyįor a period in the late 90s and early 00s it felt as if Brandy, AKA the fan-ordained “vocal Bible”, was being fast-tracked for Houston-level success.
Brandy with Whitney Houston in Cinderella.
0 kommentar(er)
