Brandy - Afrodisiac

album review:
I’ve given up trying to figure out Brandy. She’s hid out in the spotlight for too long, never tip-toeing outside her role as a teen diva-in-training, never catching flak for being a manufactured urban princess like Ashanti either. Ten amazing and terrifically impersonal years into her career, we don’t know any more about Brandy than we did in 1994, when she was a 15 year old newcomer who just desperately wanted to be down.

And that’s exactly the way she likes it, at least if Afrodisiac is any indication. Brandy wrote barely any of the lyrics herself, but the story she tells is still revealingly oblique. Afrodisiac’s being marketed as a coming-of-age record, but this isn’t the kind of “all growns up” we’re used to seeing from our female pop stars, all newly unwrapped sexuality prepackaged for maximum male hormonal meltdown—dams bursting, speeding trains, shooting fireworks, the previously coquettish young innocent dead and buried, completely eradicated so you don’t feel bad for leering at Moesha or a Mouseketeer, replaced by a brand-new fully-formed sex symbol.

Brandy briefly tries on that bare-all ensemble for “Come As You Are”, but it never quite seems to fit. Tellingly, she’d rather reminisce than stake out brazen new sexual territory—one of the album’s best and brightest cuts, “Turn it Up”, finds Brandy waxing nostalgic for Kid 'N Play's House Party, of all things.