Word: labelers
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...quality of the songs on Tracks varies widely from the terrific to the utterly assinine: most songs sound unremarkable but familiar. The first disk, however--covering the years 1972-77, but focusing heavily on 1972 and 1973, the years of Springsteen's major-label break-through--is almost uniformly very good, by far the best disk of this compilation; this is owed, in large part, to the remastered demos which Springsteen recorded solo for Columbia Records, with which the album opens. These songs will be familiar to fans of Springsteen's older work: they were released, played by the full...
...Mellencamp. Rock is on the run, youth is on the rise, and his brand of rural rock skews a little old even for the VH1 set. But Mellencamp, 47, is soldiering on, trying to re-establish his name, his image and his music. He has left Mercury Records, his label for some 20 years, and signed with Columbia. He has a new book of artwork out, Mellencamp: Paintings and Reflections (HarperCollins; $40). And he's willing to be unusually candid about almost anything he's asked...
What, for example, does he think about his former label? "[Mercury] had a terrible distribution problem," he says. "I've had humongously huge hit records, and I'd walk into like the local Target and--no stock." Nor is he fond of Jay Leno's Tonight Show: "I was on that show once and it was like, 'Ahhhh! This is brain damage!'" And like many of the ordinary folks who make up his fan base, he's fed up with the situation in Washington. "I don't understand how they got those [Clinton grand jury] tapes on TV," he complains...
Genre hopping is the favorite sport of today's pop stars, and few performers play the game better than Beck. On his major-label debut, Mellow Gold (1994), Beck helped re-energize folk motifs by combining them with hip-hop beats. On his new album, Mutations (DGC), Beck has mostly abandoned hip-hop. His new sound draws largely from older, traditional styles: pure folk, blues and, on the spirited song Tropicalia, bossa nova. The energy of Beck's hip-hop/folk experimentation is missed here; this is a ruminative album that's more about quiet revelation than sonic revolution...
There can be problems with this approach, however. For one thing, the Food and Drug Administration has approved antidepressants for only adult use. It's perfectly legal for doctors to make them available to children, but such "off-label" prescribing can be tricky. When a drug is tested and a dosage is set for an adult body, the same medication given to a person half the size can have unexpected effects. Antidepressants can lead to agitation and nervousness in anyone; in children, they may trigger full-blown manic episodes...