Celine Dion

Falling Into You could only be made by an artist like Céline Dion, who knows that whatever she puts out will be slammed by critics but adored by her ...

What we hear when listening to Falling Into You is precisely the kind of album that Céline Dion wanted to release. Like the reggae-lite of “Make You Happy”, “Your Light” is added to inject some energy to break up the ballads. Of course, she sounds so pretty on the ballads, but the weird songs deserve more attention, like the so-wrong-it’s-horseshoed-to-right reggae-pop of “Make You Happy”. Again, Dion’s performance is a very loud intertwining of both naïve and deliberate camp (gassed up, no doubt, by the evening’s sense of both camaraderie and competition). This time, we are at the grand finale, and the big-voiced divas converge on the stage: Franklin, Carey, Estefan, Twain, and Dion join forces to sing “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman”. She gallantly and dutifully allows the other divas a chance to sing, but instead of melting away into the back, Dion struts forward and answers Franklin’s soulful trills and runs with her own set of high-octane wailing. On the international version of the album, we are gifted with Dion’s take on “Because You Loved Me” was a massive hit for the star, her second number-one Billboard hit and the third hit theme for a film. At the height of her 1990s superstardom, Dion appeared on Fran Drescher’s sitcom, The Nanny, a prime example of a comic pastiche of carefully curated camp. However, dismissing Falling into You misses the point of the album because music as unabashedly sentimental as Falling Into You is designed as an outlet for uninhibited emotionalism. In her seminal essay, Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag explained camp, capturing why Céline Dion is popular by suggesting, “Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment.” She goes on to write, “Camp is generous. The other key element to the success of Céline Dion’s music is sentimental songwriting.