Word: albums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...GIPSY KINGS: MOSAIQUE (Elektra). Overbearing ethnic melodies from a group that had one of last year's fluke successes. If the Kings started toward your table in a restaurant, fiddling madly, you'd pay the maitre d' twice the price of this album to keep them away...
TRACY CHAPMAN: CROSSROADS (Elektra). The follow-up to her smash debut album in 1988 is . . . well, just like the first. Chapman's voice stays strong, her music soft, her message angry and often oppressively earnest. Straightforward and worthy but generally without excitement...
They are as scrubbed up as the Bay City Rollers and as menacing as lap cats. So what could be their main "dislikes," as listed, fan-mag style, on their 1986 debut album? Jonathan Knight, 20, and Danny Wood, 20, say "prejudice"; Donnie Wahlberg, 20, mentions "war," and Joseph McIntyre, 17, nominates "poverty." Jordan Knight, 19, Jonathan's younger brother, plumps for "all basketball teams except the Celtics." There, then. You wouldn't mind if your daughter married a New Kid, unless, of course, you're a Lakers...
...Kids together in 1985, comes from neighboring Roxbury, where the streets are definitively mean. He has produced all the Kids' records, writes much of their material and commands the instrument work ("All instruments played or programmed by Maurice Starr" reads a large credit on the Hangin' Tough album). His gifts give the Kids a smooth buzz, but his ego increasingly gives them a pain...
Starr, who assembled the soul group New Edition (from which the superlative Bobby Brown emerged), has the musical credentials that the Kids still lack. "Our first album was a Svengali-type situation," Jordan Knight concedes. "But on the second," Jon Knight adds, "we told him stuff we wanted. We're from the streets. We like music that is funky, with heavy bass...