The queen of soul is still the Queen. But that doesn't mean the material on Aretha Franklin's latest album is deserving of her crown. Last time around, on 1998's A Rose Is Still a Rose, Lauryn Hill, Puff Daddy and other hot hitmakers plied fresh beats and old-school samples to aim Aretha's R&B at young ears. Here, Mary J. Blige appears on and co-writes two of the hipper tracks, "Holdin' On" and "No Matter What," but both come up short in the melody, hook and rhythm departments, and those deficits afflict much of the rest. Ten different producers replace Rose's hip-hop energy with an adult-contemporary slickness that sometimes makes the sixty-one-year-old legend's voice seem shrill. Her Highness deserves more r-e-s-p-e-c-t than this.

“Oh Sherrie”

Steve Perry's girlfriend Sherrie Swafford was actually in the studio when Perry began writing this song--his lone Top Ten hit as a solo act--with two co-writers. The trio began at midnight one night with just "Oh, Sherrie!" and "hold on, hold on." Three hours later, they had a complete song. Swafford, however, had to wait until the next day to hear it. "Sherrie actually got tired and went to bed," Perry said. She also appeared in the video, but their relationship did not hold on for long.