Word: debutants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
Since its debut last January, The Arsenio Hall Show has passed both Pat Sajak and David Letterman in the ratings, to take the No. 2 slot behind Carson's venerable Tonight show. Hall's show ranks No. 1 among the important under-35 audience. "I take the view that the public has elected me as a new late-night talk-show host," he says enthusiastically. "I've worked all my life preparing for it, putting together a platform -- my kind of guests, my kind of music, what I think is funny. I've been warming...
...Rhode Island School of Design. But he also sketched continually, and his wife Lisa, then an art teacher, showed some of his drawings to children's book editors. "Everybody else called them odd," he recalls. "I didn't." The editors liked the oddness. In 1979 Van Allsburg made his debut with The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, in which a boy and a dog stumble onto the house of a magician who wears a fez and blows perfect smoke rings. Typically, the story ends in ambiguity: the reader never knows for sure whether the magician turns Fritz, the signature bull terrier...
Same old story. A unique gift, a fresh voice, a knack for psychic immolation. When Rickie Lee Jones broke onto the scene with her surprising and successful 1979 debut album, she seemed to signal a fresh trail for rock. But uncertainty and self-destruction crowded close. An equivocal second album was followed by an enterprising third and diminishing commercial returns. Confusion enveloped her, and Jones seemed to lunge toward the flash point. Then she pulled back, in a two-step away from the brink, consolidating and reconsidering her work. With personal turmoil put in perspective, Jones produced a new life...