What do you mean by "on top"? Look, we have about 50% of the adult population that is functionally illiterate and their music consumption habits are less sophisticated than those who were born in the 70's and came of age in the 90's.

Beyoncé has a behemoth marketing team and budget behind her, so that is a real factor as to attention that is automatically given versus the mental attention and patience it would take to sit your self down and listen to what all is really going on with a song. I've noticed that people seem to be kind of falling off Beyoncé a bit though: partially because that is just the nature of the fickle tastes of people consuming entertainment and buying into the artists, but I think it's also because people can only take so much pussy popping, booty shaking and body swirling as 70 or better percent of most of her performances.

If you were successful just now at missing the point, you thought what I just wrote was a pit of Brandy against Beyoncé--Uh, no. Just look at the simple fact that the music business is very volatile as it is without the extra complication of barely literate or illiterate, impatient, unsophisticated, hyper-sexualized consumers driving the market and what is considered "hot".

For the record, Beyoncé has a strong set of pipes and I am not unaware of her tremendous hard work down through the years, but the fact remains also that I'm seeing more and more people who think her material has become too "hoodrat-ish" of late. There is no one who sounds like Brandy, she has a sick combination of rasp, husk, and smoky in her voice that can sometimes have a "wetness" to her phrasing, she was the first one to start doing all the complicated runs and was way ahead of the whole melisma technique. My boyfriend is from Japan and she is huge out there; when he refreshed my memory about Brandy, (I had fallen off R&B to a great extent because I felt it was too reliant on sexually explicit lyrics and running/riffs and especially falsetto--too many male singers doing it, like a gimmicky formula) it was the first time I really listened to her and I was blown away. And as far as her runs, she doesn't overdo it, and it's crisp; my boyfriend said, "She sounds like Autotune" I said "No baby that's all her, and she sounds even better live!" he said, "Like she's got it in her throat or something" I said, "Yeah, I think she could tune Autotune!" Then I happened upon her videos singing in the bathroom--WHOO!

One important lesson as a mature consumer of any kind of entertainment and culture is to realize that just because someone is not the "hottest" or topping the charts or the "it" at a given time, it DOES NOT MEAN that person is not as talented as the one who is. There is a whole marketing and promotion machine that supports artists that make the executives at a label happy by complying and comporting with THEIR vision of what people need or want to hear or what kind of icon they want to place before people, so please keep that in mind. It's because of shows like The Voice and X Factor and even Idol that we see there are so many extremely talented and even rarely gifted people out there who work at freakin' TJ Maxx; so it's good to keep things in perspective.