I’m Your Baby Tonight – Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston. Remember when she was America’s sweetheart? Her hair was big, her voice was big, and the hits were colossal. She seemed to take permanent residence at #1 on the charts starting with her 1985 debut. She reigned supreme as the most popular female singer around, living the crossover dream. However, by the time 1990 rolled around, we had a problem, Houston (God, I kill me). Not only were black audiences turned off by Whitney’s goody-goody image and blatant attempts to court a pop audience, but a formidable challenger named Mariah Carey had surfaced, threatening to take Whitney’s audience. It was time for Whitney to batten down the hatches and get tough.

So, Whitney’s third effort, 1990’s I’m Your Baby Tonight was advertised as “Whitney gets funky”, or a return to her alleged “roots”. But it wasn’t, really. I mean, it’s certainly more “urban” leaning than either of her first two albums, featuring contributions from Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross as well as the then red-hot production team of L.A. & Babyface. However, don’t think for a second that Whitney considered endangering her pop audience. The music here is still straight down the middle of the road, featuring sassy dance tunes and her trademark big ballads. There was nothing as overtly pop as, say, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, but there was nothing that was going to make you stop and pause like when Mariah turned into a hip-hop hoochie in the middle of her career.

People may disagree with me, but I think Whitney was a better singer post-Bobby than she was pre-Bobby. Perhaps all the drama she went through after getting married gave her a deeper well with which to draw emotion. Since this album appears in the year 2BBB (1990-2 years before Bobby Brown), Whitney’s still indulging in the annoying habit of randomly screaming out her lyrics. If you thought older songs like The Greatest Love of All and Didn’t We Almost Have it All were a chore to get through, the same premise goes for this album’s Miracle and All the Man That I Need. Whitney’s still substituting volume for emotion on these two big ballads, and that quality makes them a chore to listen to…relatively speaking, anyway.

Baby Tonight actually goes down pretty easy, which says as much for its’ quality as it does for its’ blandness. Some tracks will definitely go by without you realizing that there’s even music on. Whitney does open up a can of sass on the mildy attitudinal new jack swing of My Name is Not Susan, but that’s as far as the edge goes. The title track is an appealing shuffle groove with a big chorus that sped straight to the top of the charts, the Vandross-produced Who Do You Love is a surprisingly uptempo, playful romp, and Lover for Life and I Belong to You have an airy, smooth sound to them, as well as relatively subdued vocals by Whitney.

In the end, though, I’m Your Baby Tonight is pretty much a wash.The good songs aren’t phenomenally good, nor are the bad songs truly horrid. It’s pretty much what you’d figure a 1990-era Whitney Houston album would sound like. Whitney still hadn’t found the true “soul” in her voice (shame that it took a catastrophic marriage and a drug habit in order for that to happen), and she still had the annoying habit of blowing your eardrums out whenever the tempo slowed. While Baby Tonight is decent, it’s as inessential as the rest of Whitney’s studio catalog (minus maybe her debut). As successful as she’s been, Whitney’s one of those artists for whom the best representation of her work is a hits package, because her albums are generally inconsistent at best. I’m Your Baby Tonight is no exception.