Word: abdul
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...nearest he ever got to combat was assassination. As a student, he had joined the Baath Party, an underground anti-Western, pan-Arab socialist movement. The party put him on a team assigned to murder Iraq's military ruler, Abdul Karim Kassem. Saddam and his confederates sprayed Kassem's station wagon with machine-gun fire as it sped through downtown Baghdad, but they missed their target. Although bodyguards killed several of the assailants, Saddam escaped with a bullet in his left leg. In the glorified words of his own hagiography -- the truth is less dramatic -- he carved out the bullet...
...move right along with him. His live show features 32 performers onstage at one time, but the indisputable center of attention remains Hammer. He has dumped the more or less standard rap choreography (strut, turn, grab crotch, strut) in favor of a stops-out, Paula Abdul kind of abandon. This boy can move, which is pretty much what he's been doing since the age of 11, when he started traveling with his hometown baseball team, the Oakland A's, as a bat boy and all-around gofer...
Milli Vanilli. Madonna. Paula Abdul. You can't be a pop star these days if you don't dance. And what keeps you on your toes isn't just a choreographer and a trainer; it's the sheer momentum from all the money out there to be made, not by performing but by succeeding. Success can't be separated from impact anymore. Marketing and merchandising are integral parts of the pop machine, just as a movie's box-office receipts become part of its cachet. Show business is the latest American spectator sport, and the number of weeks a tune...
Like Madonna and Milli Vanilli, like Paula Abdul and, yes, even like Bart Simpson, the New Kids are a phenomenon whose unapologetic commerciality is part of their appeal. They are good movers and slick singers, and they drive their mostly preteen female fans into genteel frenzies. But their success can't be separated from their impact; it's part of the pop machine's new mystique. Is it real, or is it marketing...
...World. He might return to the ancestral village years later and try to remember his childhood. But now immigrants can go time-traveling in their own histories, back and forth. One family, the Dalias, have been commuting thus between their pasts and their futures since 1926, when a forebear, Abdul-Hameed Dalia, began shuttling between the Middle East and the New World. The resulting state of mind may be painfully torn, but is often miraculously freed and creative. A sense of being treacherous to the tribe and its values coincides with a heady liberation...