ok so first off the argument that barryrepresents some epitome of emo-songwriting, a genuine and authentic guy in a world of artificiality really makes me laugh.
and generally, if one is reduced to praising a singers diction---oum kalthoum aside---then...well...it seems like damning via faint praise to me.
his earworm-addled songs are only interesting BECAUSE they are saccharine, BECAUSE they are cheesy.
but even there, you find a problem: if you approach manilow from that viewpoint, his lack of irony gets in the way of complete cheese-filled enjoyment.
for that kind of one-man vegas floor show vibe--that wholly synthetic anti-cabaret that you would go to the sands to endure--give me peter allen anyday (from amongst the tedious boys of the 70s who worked that form) because at least peter allen would shake his maracas in a bizarrely salacious way during his live act--while barry, quivering with vegas emotion, one dimensional and immobile, would have maracas of any kind never cross your mind.
barry does not shake maracas.
barry does not shake anything.
he is part of that curious wave of songwriters from the brill building combine that somehow acquired solo careers in the 1970s--the brill building which gave us carole king (whose work sounds like it actually is the way grancey describes manilow) and neil sedaka--and his "emotional depth" is perfectly symmetrical with his macdonalds jingle--for example, he sound like he means the words to that wretched confessional "mandy" in exactly the same way that he meant to inform us that "you deserve a break today" like some moses descending from the plastic mountain with the tablets of burger options and price structures. listen to the two of them back to back. the chorus of mandy is the same structurally as the macdonald's jingle. i think that's funny.
the argument that manilow somehow represents authenticity in the face of an overwhelmingly synthetic contemporary pop scene seems to me goofy: the pop scene in the 1970s was just as synthetic, maybe even more so because it was in the main less explicitly synthetic. there was no american idol, a show the premise of which is the claim that "we can make any cover-song mediocrity into a Star" (witness kelly clarkson)...no no...so the wholly saccharine world of 70s pop was able to operate as if it was somehow not entirely artificial.
near the pinnacle of that wholly synthetic 70s pop stands our boy barry.
william shatner wastes manilow
and barry wasnt even that good at being synthetic.
georgio moroder on the other hand....