Calling Brandy Norwood "precocious" for charting a single in the Billboard Top 10 at the tender age of 15 doesn't tell half the story. She was a mere 4 years old when she first voiced her determination to become a professional singer, and, at the age of 11, she released her first single.
Brandy's first recurring television role came on the ill-fated Thea, which, despite acceptable ratings, was yanked in the middle of its rookie year. To this day, there are some who insist that ABC canceled the show not because it underperformed, but because the writing and characters were too "black" to fit the network's image. Whatever the reason, the demise of the series freed up Brandy to fulfill the obligations of a recording contract she had signed with Atlantic Records. The runaway success of her 1994 single "I Wanna Be Down" proved that there was a ready market for a preternaturally beautiful adolescent laying down sexy-tough lyrics on top of a danceable hip-hop beat. Go figure. On the steam of the heralded single, Brandy's self-titled debut album charged out of the gate like a thoroughbred jacked up on a full Starbucks punch card.
One American Music Award, two Grammy nominations, and a triple-platinum certification later, the hottest 15-year-old sensation in town signed on to play the title role of TV's Moesha. The series spearheaded UPN's sophomore-year push to lock up niche markets with hip, minority-oriented programming—a strategy Fox had employed very effectively to differentiate itself from the older, more conservative networks. On the show, as in her music, Brandy's ethnicity is never politicized or pushed on the audience, but her matter-of-fact pride in herself and in her heritage, combined with her exotic looks and good-girl image, has resulted in her virtual canonization by Vibe and other African-American media outlets as the black teen role model of choice.
Brandy's family roots are in McComb, Miss., a hamlet of some 12 thousand people where both she and her mother, Sonja, were born. Sonja's father, Freddie "Paw Paw" Bates, still lives in the town, where he successfully ran several businesses, including a liquor store and a taxicab company. Paw Paw inculcated in youngest daughter Sonja his hard-driving business sense, and she took his lessons to heart—and to college, where she studied financial planning. To this day, Sonja takes great pride in the fact that her father never worked a single day for a white man.
After Sonja married church music director Willie Norwood, the couple had Brandy and a son, Ray J., who has followed in his talented older sister's singing and acting footsteps. The nuclear family then relocated to Carson, Calif., a middle-class community next door to the gangsta-rap hotbed of Compton. Growing up singing gospel with her father, Brandy's own vocalizing now owes more to the R&B sensibility of En Vogue than it does to the in-your-face attitude of, say, NWA.
In the rarified air of teen superstars, Brandy's parents seem determined to act as an oxygen mask. While they did allow L.A. Lakers phenom Kobe Bryant to take their daughter to his senior prom in Philadelphia (and even spend three days with him in Atlantic City, albeit in separate rooms), they took a sterner view of her relationship with singer Wanya Morris of the soulful quartet Boyz II Men. A few years older than she, Morris was the subject of Brandy's most debilitating schoolgirl crush. When "I Wanna Be Down" wrested the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart from the Boyz hit "I'll Make Love to You," Morris called to offer his congratulations, and Brandy was knocked head over heels. Although Sonja let Brandy develop a fast friendship with Morris, she warned the singer that if he tried to get "romantic" with her daughter before her 18th birthday that Boyz II Men would swiftly become a trio. Past that chronological milestone now, Brandy is actively dating Morris.
Brandy's mother seems to wield similar control over her daughter's career. While father Willie sums up his view of the music biz with the cryptic statement, "If you understand sharecropping, you understand the music industry," Sonja takes a much more proactive view: "I can sell my kids," she has declared bluntly. "I can sell my kids to the ocean, and the ocean would buy them." Whether or not the ocean is ponying up any cash, plenty of people are buying Brandy's music and faithfully tuning in to her TV series. Yes, the future looks bright for the young star: Never Say Never, her long-awaited sophomore album that features contributions from Monica and Bad Boy rapper Mase, will be released this coming Tuesday, June 9; and in November, she'll return to the big screen in the sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer.
-Wall of Sound
