Hey, I like "White Heat." It's definitely not a hot mess, but I'm guessing what really got to your were Madonna's ad-libs. And you can leave "Live to Tell" and "Papa Don't Preach" because you don't deserve them anyway.:p

On to the topic at hand, what I just listened to was my FAVORITE Teena Marie album, Robbery, which definitely gets an A. I LOVE how EVERYBODY divas things up in "Playboy": Teena, the guitarist, the bassist, the horn players, the drummer. Teena becomes one with the horns when she sings "throwin' up both my hands." GREAT break, too. "Midnight Magnet"s verse melody is SO sexy. Hearing Herman Hesse set to funk on "Fix It" is quite a vision. CLASSIC quiet storm is what "Dear Lover" exemplifies. The final track, "Cassanova [sic] Brown," is simply my FAVORITE Teena Marie song. It's just movement after movement--kind of like Erykah Badu's "Green Eyes," though far more coalescent. Some punny, self-referential lyrics--and a CLEVER interpretation of crying. People have talked about Mariah covering some Teena songs, and I would LOVE to hear her cover this. I'm not too fond of "Stop the World," and some lyrics throughout the album are tragic ("I had dreams of grandeur/and I was labeled like Campbell's soup"), but these minor faults don't overshadow the rest of the album.