Diana Ross: Diana : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Despite a superfluous extra disc's worth of odds and ends, this two-CD deluxe edition of Diana still qualifies as an important new release: It contrasts the Nile Rodgers-Bernard Edwards production team's original unreleased 1980 director's cut of Diana with the more conservative mix Motown released instead. The latter, a smash hit for Ross, reined in Rodgers and Edwards' foreground foreplay of big-band colors, elemental funk and instrumental solos -- which reached full fruition on Chic's 1980 masterpiece, Real People -- in favor of a stripped-down, radio-friendly emphasis on the dance beat and the vocalist. Chic's co-founders envisioned their Aunt Diana less as a maudlin middle-age soul chanteuse than as a street-smart black teenager. Heard now, the jazzier, more dangerous dynamism of their original mix is a prescient vision of the modern urban sound.