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I WANNA BE DOWN ALEX FLEMING AND JOEL LEV ON BRANDY’S ALBUM “B7” "Brandy released her first album in 1994 at fifteen, selling 6 million records. Reviews lingered with pleasure or dismissiveness on her youth and innocence, often by explicit comparison with the imagined sexual precocity of other young R&B artists like Aaliyah and Monica. Buoyed by her sitcom, Moesha, Brandy’s second album, Never Say Never (1998), was also a commercial success. It was Brandy’s third LP, Full Moon (2002), meant as a coming-of-age album, that began to explicitly thematize desire as a deep and sinuous unwinding. Now considered among her strongest works, it also marked the beginning of Brandy’s long critical and commercial fall. Piers Martin, writing for NME, panned the now celebrated album as a “velvet-lined bucket of slush” by a “photogenic warbler [who] appears to be experiencing a premature mid-life crisis … murmuring sweet nothings to anyone insane enough to listen.” [2] Other reviews demonstrate a similar mixture of desire and aversion." "The spiral gives shape to our moment. A spiral is not a direct plummet; it curves and stretches. The general direction of a spiral is clear, inevitable, even when its destination is unknown. A spiral takes the scenic route, extending the opportunity for outside observation, and thus for shame. Its curvature is the thread on a screw, tightening inexorably toward a descent that’s already foretold, but with an improvisational curlicue, a kind of campy excess. Its form is an insult added decoratively to injury. The spiral, in common meme parlance, may describe being locked into a personal flight pattern, but it also conveys a kind of curiosity: What bullshit will I get up to this time around?"

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commune_mist

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@commune_mist • 4 Years Ago

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I WANNA BE DOWN ALEX FLEMING AND JOEL LEV ON BRANDY’S ALBUM “B7” "Brandy released her first album in 1994 at fifteen, selling 6 million records. Reviews lingered with pleasure or dismissiveness on her youth and innocence, often by explicit comparison with the imagined sexual precocity of other young R&B artists like Aaliyah and Monica. Buoyed by her sitcom, Moesha, Brandy’s second album, Never Say Never (1998), was also a commercial success. It was Brandy’s third LP, Full Moon (2002), meant as a coming-of-age album, that began to explicitly thematize desire as a deep and sinuous unwinding. Now considered among her strongest works, it also marked the beginning of Brandy’s long critical and commercial fall. Piers Martin, writing for NME, panned the now celebrated album as a “velvet-lined bucket of slush” by a “photogenic warbler [who] appears to be experiencing a premature mid-life crisis … murmuring sweet nothings to anyone insane enough to listen.” [2] Other reviews demonstrate a similar mixture of desire and aversion." "The spiral gives shape to our moment. A spiral is not a direct plummet; it curves and stretches. The general direction of a spiral is clear, inevitable, even when its destination is unknown. A spiral takes the scenic route, extending the opportunity for outside observation, and thus for shame. Its curvature is the thread on a screw, tightening inexorably toward a descent that’s already foretold, but with an improvisational curlicue, a kind of campy excess. Its form is an insult added decoratively to injury. The spiral, in common meme parlance, may describe being locked into a personal flight pattern, but it also conveys a kind of curiosity: What bullshit will I get up to this time around?"