Word: girls
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scary. She can switch moods without stripping emotional gears, segueing from a raunchy growl to an angelic trill in a single line -- no sweat. She coaxes the back-street torch song Saving All My Love for You until the song's Other Woman sounds like a little girl lost in faded rapture. She stands up to the string section in that anthem of enlightened egotism, Greatest Love of All, finding the prettiest weave of velvet and voltage. Then the synthesized percussion starts blasting, and she escalates into purring teen ecstasy for How Will I Know...
...grandmaster's wife and mistress muse about being unable to fulfill his needs for fantasy and security; in this version, mother and daughter sing about a husband-father, and it makes for an electrifying duet. Throughout the album, the range and vocal glamour displayed offer testimony that Cissy's girl has grown up. Whitney marks graduation day for the prom queen of soul...
...success has helped other blacks, other women, other smooth singers find an avid reception in the pop marketplace. As Whitney, her own most dispassionate appraiser, told TIME Correspondent Elaine Dutka, "Here I come with the right skin, the right voice, the right style, the right everything. A little girl makes the crossover and VOOOM! it's a little easier for the others...
...connecting gospel urgency to show-tune sophistication. Barbra Streisand moonlighted from Broadway and never went back. The jazz inflections of Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan enriched the vocabulary of pop. The megaton voices of Jackie DeShannon, Dusty Springfield and Timi Yuro lent powerful shadings to love songs. And the girl groups -- all the -elles and -ettes, the Supremes and Shangri-Las -- kept teen pulses surging to an irresistible beat. It made for a varied, vigorous music, in the golden age of chanteuse...
...Anita Baker poured the ache of jazz into pop and sold a couple million copies of Rapture. All over the dial, female singers are anchoring distinctive personalities to the sound of soul on silk. But none have hit the plangent chord struck by John and Cissy Houston's little girl...