Celine Dion

Rockers like to imagine that this Quebeoise thrush embodies all that is Not Rock -- mushy soundtrack ballads, windswept weepers for your girlfriend's mom, cloying Hallmark poesy. We should be so lucky -- unfortunately, rock makes plenty of space for those qualities. In fact, Dion is harder than most chart-topping gangstas, and her sentimentality is bombastic and defiant rather than demure and retiring. "My Heart Will Go On" wasn't a doormat's plaint, after all; it was a threat of incommutability as ferocious as any crap metal band's profession of dominance.

Though she always used her voice as a club with which to bonk listeners, her earliest hits -- "Beauty and the Beast" with Peabo Bryson, "If You Asked Me To" -- were as harmless as they were dreadful. Unless you'd accidentally preprogrammed a Lite FM station onto your car stereo or spent too much time in the grocery store, you could safely avoid repeated exposure. Until 1996, that is, when an anonymous "house" rhythm was grafted onto "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" (written by Jim Steinman, the Meatloaf accomplice), granting Dion entree into the cheesier clubs and pop stations. But her ambitions were both grander and more crass than that, and were well served by the confluence of interests that brought her into contact with both Diane Warren and James Cameron.

In a way, Dion's attention-getting appearance on VH1's Divas was sadly appropriate -- she stands at the end of the chain of drastic devolution that goes Aretha-Whitney-Mariah. Far from being an aberration, Dion actually stands as a symbol of a certain kind of pop sensibility -- bigger is better, too much is never enough, and the riper the emotion the more true. (KEITH HARRIS)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide