Dance Diva Diana!

I really have been overdosing on legendary divas from yesteryear of late. I'm planing to write about a couple of contemporary acts in the very near future but today I want to make a post about the legendary Diana Ross. In order to prove that I haven't completely fallen into an ultra gay time-warp, I'll focus on two of Diana's best experiments with dance music - "Take Me Higher" and "Not Over You Yet".

The 90s was a depressing decade for Diana Ross fans. I don't think I'm being too unfair when I describe most of Diana's 90s output as absolute crap. Thankfully, amid the vast sea of lumbering ballads and stale, mid-tempo R'n'B, there were still a couple of bright spots. "Take Me Higher" was released as single in 1995 and presented Diana in a completely new light. Having failed to capture the interest of the R'n'B market with her two previous albums, Diana blatantly focused on the pink dollar by experimenting with a pop/dance sound. "Take Me Higher", the album, even includes a rather desperate cover of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive"! Needless to say, I loved it but the album highlight is still the title track. "Take Me Higher" is joyous 90s dance anthem that should have performed far better than it did. I would have purchased the single for the unbearably fabulous cover alone!

Diana returned to the rather uninspiring world of urban adult contemporary music on 1999's "Every Day Is A New Day" - the album where Di looks like a dead she-male hooker on the cover! The content is not much better with the glaring exception of "Not Over You Yet", which not only returned Diana to the UK top 10 but is surely in the running to be her best single of the 1990s. The Metro Mix of "Not Over You Yet" is so good it hurts. I firmly believe that an entire album of this kind of material would catapult Diana back to the top of the pop charts, where she so clearly belongs. "Not Over You Yet" is a poptastic dance treat. The line where Miss Ross demands more bass still makes me weak in the knees! I've also included an excellent club mix.

The albums, "Take Me Higher" and "Every Day Is A New Day", can be purchased from Amazon or iTunes. "Not Over You Yet" is still easily found on English Ebay.