Video Gold I (Music DVD)

With the Nashville Network and CMT helping to sell records just like MTV and VH1, Reba McEntire began making music videos in 1986 with "Whoever's in New England." She was already a star in country music by that time, but, with the help of the video, which dramatized the song's story about a wife who suspects her husband of cheating on business trips, "Whoever's in New England" took her to a new level, and from then on she made videos regularly, not only to promote new singles but also to familiarize herself with working in front of the camera, experience that served her well in later TV projects. This first volume of two collections of her videos contains 18 selections. They are presented in chronological order, but the two DVDs run concurrently rather than sequentially, the second volume also selecting 18 videos that date from 1986 to 2005. That will frustrate anyone who would prefer the earlier ones, for instance, or who just wants to watch all the videos in order. On this one, as on the second volume, the viewer can watch McEntire mature from a purveyor primarily of lovelorn and cheating songs to a benevolent figure bestowing her grace on others. At times, the concept videos contradict the song lyrics; on Bobbie Gentry's "Fancy," the story of a woman who escapes poverty by using her feminine wiles (to put it diplomatically), McEntire may sing the lyric, "I ain't been back" to the shack where she grew up, but the whole point of the video is to show her returning there. At other times, the video merely fleshes out the song, as in "Is There Life Out There," in which McEntire plays a married woman with two kids (Huey Lewis plays her husband) who returns to college. She goes for a full-scale production number with considerable humor on "Why Haven't I Heard from You," and if she doesn't execute her dance moves with the precision of Madonna, she doesn't embarrass herself, either. By the time of the benefit single "What If?," she seems, unfortunately, to have strayed into Michael Jackson/"We Are the World" territory, and by the time of "What Do You Say," she has nearly disappeared from her own video in favor of actors dramatizing the song. The music, largely in a contemporary country/adult contemporary mode, holds up well, and the viewer can enjoy the procession of images just to watch the variations in McEntire's raven locks, from the early tight perm to the big hair look of the '80s to a short phase to the free-and-easy style of the 2000s. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide