Word: debutants
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Nichols, Kushner and HBO all call Angels a movie (it will debut in two parts as it did onstage but will be rerun in one-hour episodes and in one six-hour shebang), but its high-literary and low--pop culture sensibility--it references Hegel and The Wizard of Oz--best recall Dennis Potter's British mini-series. (The Singing Detective's Michael Gambon even shows up as, of course, a ghost.) And it ranks in TV history with Potter's masterworks. The key to Angels is that it is realistic and fantastic at once--a miraculous event in mundane...
...kills more music careers than drug overdoses, plane crashes and guest appearances on American Dreams combined. It's called second-album syndrome, and it is a cruel and unpredictable assassin. Paula Cole, the promising pop-folk bohemian of the late '90s, got seven Grammy nominations for her major-label debut, then inexplicably decided to go disco. Search parties have all but given up hope of finding her. Second-album syndrome usually works quickly, but it can also behave like a slow, dignity-robbing virus. Britney Spears had a choice when putting together her second album--establish a pattern of artistic...
Only now are people beginning to notice that Keys' 2001 debut, Songs in A Minor, wasn't actually a complete record. A Minor won five Grammys and sold 6 million copies, but it was a much better media event than an album. Most of the excitement was over one song, Fallin', a little miracle of a soul ballad that merged the grooves of Mary J. Blige with the grieving of Carole King. Fallin' is one of the best love songs of the past decade. To dislike it is to dislike pop music. But the strength of Fallin', combined with...
...recent afternoon, Dash doesn't hide his displeasure. "Everything gets done half-ass with you," he says. Choke then sits on a windowsill, staring at his feet. Dash is hard not only on the movie crew. "Sometimes you just want him to shut up," says Samantha Ronson, whose debut rock album, Red, is scheduled for release in March. "But then you remember he came from nothing and built all this, and you respect what he's saying." Ronson, 26, should cherish such attention--Dash has been hawking her single, Pull My Hair Out, in clubs and on the street...
...Dash took Jay-Z on the road, but record labels weren't interested. Frustrated, Dash kept hustling Jay-Z at clubs in order to raise the money to start his own label, named in homage to the oil barons. He eventually persuaded Priority Records to distribute Jay-Z's debut, Reasonable Doubt, and it quickly sold a million copies. In 1997 Def Jam bought a 50% stake in Roc-A-Fella for about $1.5 million. Dash still laments the price but learned a business lesson. "We should have held out for more," he says. "Those f______ got us so damn...