Female Vocalist Roulette


Let's play female vocalist album roulette. I've pulled 6 out of various crates. I'll shuffle them around and pick a number for tonight's review. Will i like it, will i hate it, who knows? The suspense might malfunction and kill us all!

It won't, guns and women are both perfectly safe so long as you don't pretend they are toys.

If nothing else, i am a man of my word. Chamber 3, Barbra Streisand's What About Today, is locked and loaded. Fire at will.

Google tells me 58% of people who told google whether or not they liked it didn't. Wikipedia tells me it's 33.33% of Babs' unranked albums (meaning anybody who did buy it told 12 friends not to buy it), and the phrase "first attempt at recording contemporary pop songs," confirms that nobody likes this thing. So, i should find loads of things to compliment....

I know exactly why people didn't like this album. It has nothing to do with Barbra, the song selections, or the message. It's the same problem The 4 Seasons had. It's 1969, and nobody has any idea how to process this material coming from big showbiz insiders. Is she making fun of the Beatles, Paul Simon, and Bacharach/David? Is she just grasping at a market trend? Am i supposed to suddenly like Vaudeville/Cabaret because it's topically relevant to my life? How dare she express an opinion about war being bad, and question the value of purely material wealth! How dare she implore us to stand up for what we believe in and argue for peace, tolerance, and social equality!

Bah humbug, I say. This is as good as any other Barbra Streisand album (i do have more, you know). Like i was saying about Billy Vaughn, this isn't about Barbra trying to win over new fans, it's about telling the people who already love and listen to her that these ideas and the songs that convey them are legitimate. She's just taking the prevailing musical attitude and incorporating it into her own highly refined persona. Millions of people hate her, but she's still famous, successful, and surrounded by personal and professional praise. I don't like a couple of her interpretations, but i'm pretty sure the 10 highly successful albums before this one (and the 40 something more yet to come) will do her just fine.

Whether you love it or hate it, it's fascinating to hear her try to interpret them (they are real interpretations, not just mindlessly singing pop songs). I don't hear it as mockery, i hear it as acting. She's putting on a little musical with songs from the radio in everybody's living room. The story they build is completely familiar: why is it so strange to be kind, to love one another, and to stop blowing each others' brains out while calling us the bad guys for refusing to participate?

Seems like a reasonable question, even coming from an out of touch diva.

Next

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