Barbra Streisand: Barbra Joan Streisand : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Like all of Barbra Streisand's albums, Barbra Joan Streisand is an expertly produced commercial product designed for the widest possible audience. A kind of tour-de-force of overreaching, Barbra Joan follows the successful Stoney End in purveying both the "old" (Broadway superqueen) and the "new" (Broadway superqueen in expensive hippie drag) Streisand images. It comes in a studiedly casual, though glamorous, visual package. Thickly arranged, with the incessant employment of strings, the songs vary in style from the synthetic nightclub pop rock of Bacharach-David a medley of "One Less Bell to Answer" and "A House Is Not a Home" to John Lennon-primal "Love" and "Mother." The whole turns out to be an uneasy mix. Three Carole King songs "Beautiful." "Where You Lead," and "You've Got a Friend" are included, and they provide the key to what's wrong with the record.

Just as Barbra's Stoney End might be called her Laura Nyro album, this might be considered her Carole King album. On Stoney End Barbra did a creditable imitation of Laura Nyro, who herself embodies a wide range of stylistic affectations. But Carole King is a different kettle of fish, and her meaning is lost on Barbra. The best Carole King songs express the basic sentiments powerful cliches, actually with remarkable terseness and lack of pretension. In order to be effective in performance, they must be delivered in a matter-of-fact manner, since their emotions are so direct that they need only be stated, or even understated. Barbra Streisand invariably dramatizes and stylizes whatever she sings, and although she has partly subdued the impulse to act and cough up special effects, she has not gone far enough. Her persistent emotiveness, with overtones of hysteria, is still apparent, and Carole's tough-fragile songs sink under the weight of this stage business. On "Beautiful," the most successful of the three King interpretations, Barbra comes off sounding something like Lena Horne, but lacking the final brassy polish of complete stylization.

An unqualified bummer is Barbra's rendition of John Lennon's "Mother," in which she "belts out" the primal scream. A mechanized shriek that has all the humanity of a police siren, it makes an embarrassing mockery of a great song Barbra's "Love" similarly suffers from theatrical preciousness. On two cuts–"Space Captain" and "I Mean to Shine" the "new" Barbra shows impressive vocal assurance, especially in the upper register where she sounds somewhat like the latter-day Diana Ross, quite comfortable without vibrato. This suggests that Barbra could develop into an accomplished apostle of Broadway soul.

It is the "old" Barbra, however, who provides, with one exception, the strongest cuts on the album. The exception. "The Summer Knows," is the abysmal theme from the film Summer of '42. A wistful Michel LeGrand tune plastered with gibberish filler lyrics and ornamented with surf-'n'-gull sound effects, it is an atrocity beyond redemption. Barbra has always been most at home with melodramatic, self-pitying tear jerkers, and her wailing of the old Lenny Welch hit "Since I Fell For You" is Streisand showmanship of a high order–icily, sensationally vulgar.

In the same vein, but less spectacular, is the Laura Nyro song "I Never Meant to Hurt You." The high point of the album, the Bacharach-David medley, is pure vintage Streisand. A duet with herself, she croons it like it is for all the male models and Marjorie Morningstars of this world with klieg lights in their eyes. Everything works together to achieve the ultimate in pop professionalism. More than Dionne Warwicke) even, Barbra Streisand would seem to be the singer best suited to record the complete Burt Bacharach-Hal David songbook. It would be the crowning achievement of her recording career. As for the Carole King and John Lennon songbooks, god forbid.