I approached [“Treat Her Like a Lady”] with a textbook’s worth of ammunition on cultural appropriation and latterday minstrelsy, but screw it: Sure, [Céline] Dion may not have known much about the controversy over misogyny in dancehall reggae that occasioned this schoolin’-the-roughnecks tune by Jamaican singer Diana King, but she can get behind the title sentiment. With King on hand interjecting patois and Detroit girl group Brownstone on jump-rope vocals, Dion doesn’t seem to be doing a patronizing pastiche; she sounds wiggly, jubilant, her own goofy self. And that there exists a Céline Dion antisexist dancehall-reggae anthem is nothing short of the sort of Ripley’s Believe It or Not item that makes it a joy each morning to wake up alive.
Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, p. 141.
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