Whenever Bessie Smith sang, she bellowed. Whenever she walked, she strutted. HBO's decades-in-the-making biopic, Bessie, renders the legendary blueswoman's sheer audacity in several magnetic scenes.
There are a lot of moving parts – and not all of them work – jammed into the vibrant and entertaining Fox pilot Empire, which premieres on Wednesday and qualifies as one of 2015's eagerly anticipated new shows, at least early on.
It’s been more than a decade since Aaliyah Haughton died in a plane crash on Aug. 25, 2001, at 22, and 20 years since her 1994 debut, 'Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.' Nonetheless, the singer has become the go-to muse for millennial R&B.;
The begging begins about 55 seconds into "You're My Fantasy," the opening track on "Paula." Over gentle salsa strums, Robin Thicke pleads "please" seven times in a row to a woman whose absence feels ghostlike ("I can smell your perfume/-Y
