Stacy Lattisaw - Sixteen (1983) [Reissue 2005]

A few years before the teenage-to-womanhood liberation of Janet Jackson's epic Control album, Stacy Lattisaw stripped a lot of her R&B roots away on this album-length ode to being teenager. It's a heavily sugarcoated synth pop affair, no doubt due in part to the production aesthetics of Narada Michael Walden, who took many of the ideas implemented here and evolved them for other artists such as Whitney Houston later in the decade. The topics are highly predictable in nature, with titles like "16," "Black Pumps and Pink Lipstick," and "What's So Hot 'Bout Bad Boys" pretty much delivering as advertised. However, Lattisaw's vocals are in prime form, as she easily reaches a wide range of notes and delivers passages with relative ease, something that a very young diva in training by the name of Beyoncé no doubt heard on her parents' turntable.