Word: albums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Right now, no one is playing the pop game as cannily as George Michael. Faith, with all that body language, spent three recent weeks at the top of the U.S. singles chart. The Faith album, which contains last summer's smash I Want Your Sex ("Sex is natural/ Sex is fun/ Sex is best/ When it's one on one"), is currently holding down the second slot on the top pop albums and looks to be good for some more heavy hit-single action...
...false start with a show about Richard the Lion-Hearted sent Rice back to the Bible for inspiration, and he found it in the greatest story ever told. Jesus Christ Superstar was an instant hit, first as a single pop song, then as a double album, finally as a 1971 stage show in New York. It was not the first rock musical -- Galt MacDermot's Hair preceded it, as did the Who's "rock opera" Tommy -- but its impact was extraordinary. Lloyd Webber hated Director Tom O'Horgan's lurid, heavenzapoppin' staging, which featured a transvestite Herod, Judas in silver...
...script, just a lot of numbers in a shape to tell a story," remembers Prince. "We moved some numbers around and made a straight line, added tension and all the rest. To me this was a strange process of coming up with a show, working from an album backward." Prince's starkly effective staging echoed Lloyd Webber's view of the music ("cold, cold, cold...
...personalities and anthems of rock gave pulse to the politics and identity to the young. It was the sound that they inhabited -- Steppenwolf, Country Joe and the Fish, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles going into their White Album phase and, above all, Bob Dylan, still. Dylan's music had a genius of portent: "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind." Back in 1965 he had written, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" He was right...
...Stevens' new Musicmasters album Bach on Marimba, a selection of the Inventions (originally written for a keyboard instrument) leap and dance crisply, while the chorale Christ lag in Todesbanden shimmers and glows. "With the xylophone, you hear more brittleness," explains Stevens. "With the marimba you hear the air column, a mellow, captivating sound that is rich in bass, like an organ...