Franklin always lays it on thick, but this album sometimes sounds a bit thin. A hip-hop track called I Like Me could almost be a parody (one defensive boast: "I got a hot wife, no need to be a pimp"), and the R&B is pretty wan. But I Am God, with the Christian-rock star tobyMac (formerly of dc Talk), is a worrisome rap-rock collision that eventually takes flight, thanks to a soaring chorus and a divine showdown - and thanks too to a hip-pop gospel maximalist who sounds best when he's going way over the top.
THE MAKING OF A MAN
Jaheim
Dec. 13, 2007
Jaheim is an R&B singer with a rapper's image, and his lyrical persona is a thug with a sensitivity-training diploma. Almost every line on The Making of a Man, his fourth album, sounds like it's sung with a clock ticking. He's got to start a new life, and he has no time to waste. He wants to convince one woman or another that he's turned good, that he doesn't just think about himself anymore. Thus, from I've Changed: Pull out the fine-wine glasses, dinner in bed,/ Went and took some culinary classes,/ Gotta stay sexy for you, baby, tightened up my body,/ Workin' on my ghetto Pilates.
But he's always got his fingers crossed behind his back. It's a record about that moment - turning 30, maybe - when you take half-stock of your life, when you think on old mistakes, reckon what can or should be changed and calculate how much treachery you can still allow yourself.
That conceit, and Jaheim's husky, feathery, Teddy Pendergrass-ish voice, keep The Making of a Man afloat through stretches of fairly routine songwriting and production. This kind of bath-salts R&B comes with long-standing tradition attached; this record's got its obligatory percussion chimes, endless ballad tempos, smooth backup vocals and other romantic musical cliches.
But it's got good ideas too. Jaheim updates Bobby Womack's complicated old song If You Think You're Lonely Now on Lonely; there are rudimentary horn arrangements here and there, in knowingly rough echoes of Philadelphia soul. And Jaheim writes verses spilling over with dilemma, delivering tough thoughts in silky rhythmic bursts.
Rufus Wainwright
Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall
Dec. 4, 2007
On this ambitious live disc, the showbiz kid with the yowza voice re-creates Judy Garland's 1961 show at the same venue. Depending on your taste in music, this is either a loving seance that swings or the equivalent of being trapped in the closet with Rip Taylor.
With his lazy-river phrasing muddled annunciation that turns some listeners off the 34-year-old tackles the Great American Songbook with modern gravitas. No matter how many times it's been done, the climactic Over the Rainbow is mind-blowing.
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