Word: debutants
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...Sore Centralismo The product of Jakarta's suburbs and the American education system, the twenty-something members of Sore have the uniquely Indonesian capacity to sound optimistically world-weary. On their debut album Centralismo, the group has written romantic songs inspired by the old corners of central Jakarta where they hung out as kids. The mellow blend of guitar, piano and strings evokes a retro sound from the late '60s without being derivative. It's an album perfect for those rainy days when all you really want to do is lie back and dream of a simpler time in your...
...figures on Barsuk Records, an independent label so tiny that it gets most of its mail at a P.O. box. With Plans, the band moves to the hulking multinational Atlantic, and even though big record companies are in danger of mismanaging themselves into irrelevance, the major-label debut remains an important marker in a group's development, kind of like a rock-'n'-roll Bar Mitzvah. There's a big stage, lots of buzz, some singing and, if everything goes well, checks with impossibly large numbers waiting...
...moving portrayal of Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly accused of rape and defended by Gregory Peck, in 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird; of pancreatic cancer; in Los Angeles. Born George Fisher in Harlem, N.Y., the gifted bass singer toured cabaret clubs before making his film debut in 1954 as a vicious sergeant in Otto Preminger's landmark all-black production of Carmen Jones. Determined to shed his villainous image, he played a gay trumpet player in the film The L-Shaped Room and won a Tony nomination for his lead role as a South African preacher...
...could sustain a long run, as well as intraprison intrigue, including a simmering racial rumble. And who knows? Maybe, 24-style, Scofield could break out of a bigger and better prison every season (Rikers Island! Guantánamo!). Sure, that would take some strenuous plotting gymnastics. But in its confident debut, Break shows that implausibility can be, well, captivating. --By James Poniewozik
...first week of release, The College Dropout sold 441,000 copies--an extraordinary number for a debut--and entered Billboard's album chart at No. 2, behind velvet colossus Norah Jones. Immediately West started grumbling about disrespect. He complained about ambivalent words in glowing reviews, whined to his label about a lack of promotion, suggested that magazines pay to put him on their cover (in case you're wondering: uh, no) and, most famously, walked out of the American Music Awards when he lost Best New Artist to country singer Gretchen Wilson ("I was the best new artist this year...