Child pop prodigy, teen movie star, Hollywood divorcee - there have been many sides to Brandy. Yet the credit she is least likely to have applied to her CV, that of 'sonic radical', may just prove her legacy. Granted, the waif-like beauty cuts an unlikely avant-garde figure. But, when the teen shockers have been long forgotten and the daytime shows have ceased to air, the only thing left will be the singles.
And what singles they've been. From "The Boy Is Mine" onward, Brandy - usually with the help of producer Rodney Jerkins - has crafted the sort of pop that Phil Spector would have been proud of in his prime. Hooky and thoroughly commercial, offering pop pleasure aplenty and yet containing musical ideas that filtered down to the leftfield. In fact, so pervasive was the influence of Brandy and contemporaries like Destiny's Child for a time, whole chunks of this record could serve as a document of that brief period when it appeared the ideas factory of the underground had become the preserve of the mainstream.
That's not to suggest for one moment that other chunks of this release don't serve only to remind us how bereft of inspiration this music can be when the super producers have the day off. They do, and unfortunately the programmers of this career Best Of haven't seen fit to segregate the great from the truly awful. So, "The Boy Is Mine" has only a mediocre Mase collaboration between it and the jaw-dropping horror of Brandy's 'tribute' to Phil Collins, the decimation of the already appalling, "Another Day In Paradise". But, forgive her the occasional taste lapse because when Jerkins, Timbaland or recent recruit Kanye West are on board it's a different story.
Fans of Four Tet won't find it hard to figure why Kieren Hebden has often confessed a debt to Rodney Jerkins' production on "The Boy Is Mine". Hardly the extremes of Timbaland at his most sonically perverse, the track nonetheless brings the finger piano into mainstream R'n'B for the first time. It's a beautiful sound and even now it's still striking simply to hear this texture in the context of a trad R'n'B duet. Like Hebden's best tracks, the processed modernism of the production only enhances the acoustic purity of the instrument.
It's little surprise that when Jerkins set to work on the lead single from the next record he felt the need to pull some tricks out of the bag. The insanely elastic digi-groove of "What About Us?" was the result, more than holding its own at a time when Timbaland was routinely 'reinventing' R'n'B with increasingly minimal productions that drew on African and Jamaican sounds for Missy Elliott, Tweet and others.
All the same, it was the Elliott cohort that Brandy looked to next to give her a mainline to the zeitgeist. With Jerkins busy at home reworking his CV, Timbaland's results were mixed on fourth album, "Afrodisiac", and although the title track contains some of his usual magic, its the Kanye West pitch-in, "Talk About Our Love", that steals the album and manages to trump all other R'n'B releases of 2004 in the process.
Now Timbaland's back to deliver the single that leads the campaign for this record, "Who Is She 2 U?" Perhaps it's an off-cut from the "Afrodisiac" sessions but if that's the case it begs the question of why it didn't make the grade in the first place. Amply proving Brandy's continued relevance it still can't conceal the sense that the creative prime of R'n'B's most maverick producers may finally have passed.
Truly, this is a curate's egg of an album, containing some of the most radical commercial pop recorded in the last decade and some frankly piss poor Smooch'n'B. And, whilst she may never win one of those hip Shortlist Music Prize awards, Brandy's legacy will be secure every time an anorak takes one of her records to the counter claiming it's for his girlfriend.
