Aretha Franklin

The lady who once begged for respect offers to "be a fool for you" during the slow build to "Oh Me Oh My's" crescendo, while "Rock Steady" attempts to replicate James Brown's funk licks. The title track has gospel gauze, and like the best spirituals, it's alternately humanistic and ethereal, mournful and rapturous. Franklin convincingly declares "the soul is intact."

Aretha's new album is quite disorienting. Except for the single. "Rock Steady," there's
nothing left of her old Memphis-Muscle Shoals soul sound; in fact it sounds closer to a pop
record than a soul record. Two of the songs Aretha wrote for the album. "First Snow in
Kokomo" and "All The King's Horses" could pass for tunes from old Broadway musicals if you
didn't check the album credits. There are also some jarring lapses in taste, (like... More >

This plays straight to the nouveau-bourgeois black album audience, with all the self-consciousness and instrumentation that implies, but though it's genteel it's never bloodless: Aretha's free-flight improvisations are vehicles of a romanticism extreme and even unhinged enough to soar from the Afro-American experience right into the blithe fantasies of pop. She makes "Long and Winding Road" rock and turns the programmatic title anthem into a hymn. She proves herself a fond observer of everyday life on her own "First Snow in Kokomo." And on "Day Dreaming" she provides a metaphor her American-dreaming sisters and brothers can relate to: the song is wishful thinking, but the man it's about may just be real anyway, and that's the way America is sometimes. (Grade - A)