Brandy cements her Hollywood legacy with star on Walk of Fame – USA Today

Brandy has officially gone from Hollywood High to the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The 47-year-old Grammy winner and “Cinderella” star from McComb, Mississippi, on March 30 was honored with the 2,839th star on the Walk of Fame as Issa Rae and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds sang her praises.
“Seeing the stars on the Walk of Fame lit something in me. It made me believe. It made me affirm over my own life: I’m going to sing my way on to one of these stars. And I did!” Brandy said from the podium to laughs and cheers from the crowd.
“As honored as I’ve been by every accolade, every milestone, every form of recognition, I didn’t want to stop at just being remembered on the Hollywood High School mural. I wanted a legacy written in stone.”
The multi-hyphenate – who boasts Billboard No. 1 hits “The Boy Is Mine” (with Monica) and “Have You Ever?” – has left an imprint in Hollywood as the first Black actress to play Cinderella in the made-for-TV 1997 musical as well as the titular character in the 1996-2001 UPN series “Moesha.”
Rae, who went from releasing a web series to creating and starring in the hit HBO show “Insecure,” highlighted Brandy’s role as a trailblazer.
“[‘Moesha’] was the first show that I’d ever seen told from an ordinary Black teenage girl’s point of view, set in LA, the same city I was born in and would move back to that same year it premiered,” Rae said.
“Brandy made Moesha someone I wanted to befriend, the girl I wanted to be. At a time when beauty standards on television looked nothing like us, Brandy was the standard,” she continued.
“To me, Brandy was and is the blueprint. Without Brandy as Moesha, there’s no ‘Parkers’, there’s no ‘Girlfriends’, there’s no ‘Insecure.’ And honestly, without Moesha, there is no me as a writer, because at 11 years old, that show gave me the confidence to write my very first TV sitcom, which was so, so, so, bad. But thank God I got better.”
Babyface drew from his three-decade friendship with Brandy, as well as his expertise as a producer for some of R&B and pop’s biggest hit songs, as he celebrated Brandy’s latest accomplishment.
“For me, you have one of the best voices I’ve ever heard. You give one of the best feelings I’ve ever heard. The soul that’s in your voice. The way you move your voice, you’re like an athlete the way you can move your voice. No one can do it the way that you do it,” Babyface said.
“I think of Brandy as one of the best voices of our time, and I work with all of them.”
Brandy’s memoir, “Phases,” releases March 31.

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