Ultimate Divas!

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warbachavid
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Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2004 8:30 pm

Ultimate Divas!

Post by warbachavid »

Ultimate Divas: The Greatest Female Vocalists of Our Time
Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Gladys Knight, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, Chaka Khan, Annie Lennox, Toni Braxton, Mary J. Blige, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, et al.


Reviewed by Barry Walters

Divas have been around for centuries, but it's gay men who've translated them from the opera world into the pop arena, informing our ideas about contemporary female singers as strong-willed, independent, occasionally wacky souls. Ultimate Divas doesn't offer much that's new to the average adult sodomite, but that's precisely the point: Aside from its tragic omission of disco, this is a perfect primer on 20th-century gay-pop preferences, the ideal junior-high graduation present for that nelly nephew in your life.

Spanning 1940s Billie Holiday and Lena Horne to recent Mary J. Blige and Toni Braxton, Ultimate Divas nearly lives up to its "Greatest Female Vocalists of Our Time" subtitle, although Peggy Lee, Dusty Springfield, k.d. lang, and at least a dozen others could have served just as well. The track selection seems to be defined by economics as much as by history: Arista, the label behind the project, owns seven of the 17 selections, and the resulting cuts by Chaka Khan, Dionne Warwick, and Aretha Franklin are hardly quintessential. Yet any album that unites Ella Fitzgerald's "Someone to Watch Over Me," Gladys Knight's "Midnight Train to Georgia," and Annie Lennox's "Why" is obviously doing something pin
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