Gloria Gaynor - I Will Survive: The Anthology [2CD Set] (1998)

Disco lives in the '90s, and Gloria's 2-disc set gets the ball spinning with more than two hours of disco classics and side-long 18-minute medleys (two of 'em making their CD debut). Includes the original and remix of I Will Survive , plus Never Can Say Goodbye; Do It Yourself; Reach Out; I'll Be There; Let Me Know (I Have a Right) , and 18 more tracks.

Two CDs' worth of Gaynor is, frankly, a lot: Beyond her two classics (the brilliant, cyclically relentless title track and "Never Can Say Goodbye"), there's not much that made it above the dustier reaches of the charts, and not much that deserved to. Gaynor was a disco diva by the numbers, and her career lived and died with the style--her records are generic in the sense that they were absolutely of their genre. So I Will Survive is programmed for discophiles more than for Gaynorphiles--the real star here is the production. The set includes three medleys that occupied full sides of her first three disco albums, as well as tracks from her '74-'81 albums that show off what her arrangers could do. --Douglas Wolk