Dueling Divas
On their new releases, Mariah Carey still has the voice, but Whitney Houston delves deeper

Date: November 27, 1998
By Joan Anderman, Globe Correspondent

From The Boston Globe
Submitted by: Rachel D.


You can scorn the well-worn song formulas, the flashy vocal pyrotechnics, endlessly cliched romantic lyrics, and diva-esque showboating. But only a fool would deny that Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey can sing. Their voices are natural wonders, dazzling instruments that navigate notes like heat-seeking missiles: technically precise, mechanically pristine, and thoroughly reliable.

But state-of-the-art vocalizing doesn't necessarily translate to a compelling artistic statement. Houston and Carey have become the premier pop-soul singers of their generation, not by way of vision or integrity, but by returning again and again to a tried-and-true recipe of hard licks and easy songs.

Both singers have just released new CDs. Carey's "No.1's" is a collection of singles that have topped Billboard charts - 13 of them since her 1990 debut - plus four bonus tracks. Houston's "My Love Is Your Love" is her first nonsoundtrack-related album of new music in eight years. Both are, happily, interested in updating their sounds.

Carey, who began to incorporate hip-hop elements on her last two albums, recorded one of "No.1's" new tracks with the young rapper Jermaine Dupri. Houston enlisted the writing and producing talents of Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill, both of the Fugees; Missy Elliot; Soulshock and Karlin; and 21-year-old Rodney Jerkins, who recently produced the hit "The Boy Is Mine" for Brandy and Monica.

But while Carey continues to sound like she's jumping through hoops, Houston has begun to explore emotional depths that transcend the formidable gymnastic feats that have largely defined both.

A broad, genuine vocal palette involves feel and texture and the understanding that sometimes less really is more - especially when extracting meaning from a big ballad like "When You Believe." The song - a button-pushing, modulating R & B behemoth recorded as a duet for DreamWorks' upcoming animated feature "The Prince of Egypt" - appears on both women's CDs.

On alternating verses, Carey sells the song's spiritual message with spit-and-polish phrasing and judiciously timed catches in her throat. Houston lets a quietly fluid and vastly more palpable passion color her delivery. While Carey drops riff after impressive riff, Houston fans out in a subtler, cohesive weave, finding in the inspirational words something more than scaffolding for her voice.

Like her vocal technique, Houston's material is less dependent on connect-the-dots histrionics and more tuned in to a supple, streetwise ambience. There's still a fair share of unbearably familiar Diane Warren-penned pop fare: "I Learned From the Best" and "You'll Never Stand Alone," for instance, are cluttered with musical and lyrical cliches. But the Hill-produced remake of Stevie Wonder's "I Was Made to Love Her" is a loose and muted flash of soul, and Jean's lovely title song is a spare, reggae-tinged gospel that rests on a bed of organic beats. An earthy, more human side of Houston emerges to match the lean character and fresh attitude of those songs.

Even "It's Not Right," essentially a pedestrian dance tune, is enlivened by stuttering kalimba sounds, nervous electronic beats, and coiled bursts of melody from Houston. She's singing to a man who's cheating and lying - as she does on many of the songs here - and despite the album's disclaimer that "all events and characters depicted in this album are fictitious," Houston's marriage to well-documented bad boy Bobby Brown seems to have turned her attention from romantic illusion to a more reality-based view of relationships. That edgy awareness cuts to the core of "Heartbreak Hotel," a slinky, processed tune on which Houston proteges Faith Evans and Kelly Price urge her - with their dry, modern guest vocals - to go further afield from the confines of old-school balladry into an intriguing, urban-gospel terrain.

Carey, on the other hand, co-opts hip-hop beats and popular rappers to modernize, but never revolutionize, her innocuous brand of soul. Thirteen back-to-back hits spanning her career and her five-octave range, plus a handful of shoo-ins for the next hit parade, bring into bold relief Carey's catalog of interpretive devices: soft-and-breathy (vulnerable), adorably hoarse (yearning), and wailing (passionate). The mere fact that at this relatively early point in her career she's looking back with a self-described "thank you" compilation seems an apt reflection of Carey's artistic ambitions.

"Baby, won't you be my sweetheart, and we could share a storybook romance," she sings to the rapper JD, who supplies a sanitized version of street cred on the new tune "Sweetheart." ("When You Believe," "Whenever You Call," a duet with Brian McKnight from the "Butterfly" CD, and a remake of "I Still Believe" are the other bonus tracks.) For all her dabblings in recent years with hip-hop luminaries Puff Daddy and O.D.B., Carey is clearly intent on preserving a mythologized image of love - and Mariah Carey, for that matter - that's as buffed and flashy as her picture-postcard licks. Houston, meanwhile, seems ready to peel back the layers.