Diana Ross: Baby It's Me : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Diana Ross' gifts aren't easy to capture on record. In fact, it's been a decade since anybody has done it consistently. She's campy and prone to self-parody. And though Ross is a limited vocal technician (her voice is as light and reed-thin as her skinny body), she can alternately be sullen, sultry, dramatic and just plain silly. Still, it's a shame that her abundant gifts have gone unchallenged for so long.

Richard Perry wouldn't have been my first choice as producer for this type of project. For one thing, Perry always seems to be too self-consciously arty in his approach, and then there was his work with Martha Reeves, a fiery renegade who suffered from Perry's teak-and-glass production. But these days Diana Ross is a lot closer to Barbra Streisand than Martha Reeves, and try as I might, I find much of Baby It's Me hard to resist.

The instrumentation is surprisingly sparse and at times quite odd. Strings rather than horns (with few exceptions) are used for punctuation and momentum, a device that works just fine at times ("All Night Lover") and badly elsewhere. On Stevie Wonder's "Too Shy to Say," keyboards and strings provide the only backdrop, creating a campy piece of torch. The only real lapses in taste are the title song, an awkward attempt at mixing Diana Ross and funk (it's like staging a showcase performance by Ross in a rib joint—a second-rate one at that) and "Your Love Is So Good for Me," a perfunctory four-minute disco number.

At least three songs on Baby It's Me are meant to recall the Supremes (an idea that fits well here but would wear thin if repeated). The best are the two cowritten by Jerry Ragovoy (a Sixties soul producer responsible for a number of cult classics by Lorraine Ellison and Howard Tate), who, with one seemingly trite couplet ("Every time you hold me/You just about control me") brings Diana Ross right into focus. Of course there are more grandiose and melodramatic moments. Not only "Too Shy to Say" and Melissa Manchester's "Confide in Me," but also "Come in from the Rain" (written by Manchester and Carole Bayer Sager), the album's finale, which sports a production so unashamedly stagy and manipulative that it's hard to resist.

You don't listen to Diana Ross for great truths, and she sure doesn't heal wounds like Aretha Franklin. What Diana Ross does better than anybody, though, is provide her audience with an immediate (if not very lasting) emotional gratification. On that level, Baby It's Me is a minor triumph.