Haircuts 3, Substance 0

By DAVID CHEAL

Jennifer Lopez
This is Me Then, Epic, pounds 14.99

Whitney Houston
Just Whitney, Arista, pounds 13.99

Mariah Carey
Charmbracelet, Mercury, pounds 13.99


ARMIES of producers were hired. Platoons of studio engineers were recruited and studios were block-booked for weeks at a time. Truckloads of musicians were put on standby. Songwriters were commissioned. Stylists were consulted. There were doubtless high-level conferences and lunches to decide who would undertake the sleeve design and photography. Hairdressers and make-up artists were signed up. And whole divisions of lawyers and accountants were instructed to handle the infinite legal and financial complexities that emerge when a modern-day pop diva decides to make a new record. The results of all this painstaking endeavour are being unleashed on a hungry pre-Christmas market in three consecutive weeks: new albums from, in order of release, Jennifer Lopez , Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey - three of the biggest-selling female pop singers of all time. (Mariah Carey alone has shifted 160 million units.) And, for two of them, these are albums that carry extra significance; in Mariah's case, because it is her first release since being paid a reported pounds 38 million by her former label EMI to go away and make records with someone else, and in Whitney's case, because in recent years she's gone a bit flaky.

The most striking thing about all three albums is that beneath the glossy sheen and Mario Testino-style sleeve photography, there is not very much substance. This is music that has been polished and polished to within an inch of its life - over-produced, over-worked, immaculately smooth.

Take a look at the credits on all three albums, and you'll find that only one song has a single person's writing credit (You Light Up My Life by Joe Brooks appears on Whitney's album); all the others are team efforts, sometimes by up to six people. Six! The average is four. How is it possible for so many people to write a song and for that song to emerge with any sense of emotional integrity or authenticity? It's not. This is, for the most part, music that has been constructed, assembled, rather than written.

The album on which this triumph of style and marketing over content reaches its apogee is that of the woman we have come to know as J.Lo; it's insipid, lifeless, lightweight, unmemorable, drifting along in a haze of niceness, so insubstantial that it would blow away in a breeze.

At least Mariah Carey takes possession of her music; hers is a lush, sprawling, over-long collection of impressive-sounding but not terribly affecting songs, though there are moments when it achieves a certain mesmeric dream-like beauty. And that eerie sound that noodles away in the background sometimes, the one that sounds a bit like Roger Whittaker whistling? It's Mariah, singing in that unfeasibly high register. Will it sell? My suspicion is that EMI will hear it and weep at their mistake.

The best of the bunch by far is Whitney. If this is what flakiness has done for her, then let's have more of it. Here is a singer who isn't afraid to let us know how she feels, and whose gospelly hollering reminds us where all this music once came from, why it was once called soul music. It's not a great album by any means: the backing vocals sometimes threaten to overwhelm Whitney's voice, she still hasn't tempered her tendency to use 37 notes when two - or possibly even one - would do the trick, and she overdoes the power ballads. But when she sings, she sounds as if she means it.