Consumer Guide Album

Aretha Franklin: A Rose Is Still a Rose [Arista, 1998]
Unlike James Brown, say, or Ray Charles, the Queen of Soul is at home with up-to-the-minute black pop, cherry-picking producers the way Jerry Wexler once did songwriters. Cf. the uncountable rhythm tracks of Puffy Combs's apparently simple (and apparently unsampled) "Never Leave You Again"; Dallas Austin's long-suffering yet somehow jaunty "I'll Dip," on which Aretha sings barely a scrap of the written melody, improvising the verse and embellishing a chorus hook stated by a multitracked backup diva; Daryl Simmons's "In the Morning," disintegrating over and over into a mournful "I don't wanna be the other woman"; Franklin's own "The Woman," inarticulate in its wronged pain until she moans and scats the coda into a show of the pride she brushed by in the second verse; and Lauryn Hill's equally impressive title cut, whose unaffected big-sisterhood underpins the godmother's most credible feminist outreach ever. None of these 11 songs aspires to the declarative tunes and pungent phrases of the soul era, and at 55 Aretha is losing her high end. But after a decade in artistic seclusion, she had something to prove, and she did--with an album as audacious and accomplished as such great Wexlers as Spirit in the Dark or Young, Gifted and Black. A