Word: platinum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Amount of time that diamond, platinum, or gold selling recording artists will appear on stage at this year’s Harvard Springfest...
...Platinum (UPN, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.; previews Monday, April 14, 9 p.m. E.T.) accomplishes nothing else, it shows that the hip-hop record business has all these milieus beat: people shoot, get shot, squabble over contracts and end up in the hospital! Straight-arrow Jackson Rhames (Jason George) and his streetwise brother Grady (Sticky Fingaz) have a dream job--running the independent record label Sweetback--but they also have a few problems. Their top act, an Eminem-like white rapper, is a thug, and his last record tanked. If they poach a rival label's star, it could start...
Except for cable series like Showtime's Soul Food, TV is averse to dramas that star African Americans. Even UPN, with its stable of "urban" comedies, mostly populates its dramas with white folk and the occasional Vulcan. Platinum would be notable simply for its casting, but its blackness goes deeper. Writer and co-creator John Ridley (Three Kings) has produced a story about the ascendancy of black pop culture in America, not only among black people, and the ironies that result when the art of the dispossessed goes mainstream. Ridley, who is black, is fascinated by the world...
These are good ideas--often better than their execution. Fingaz, of rap group Onyx, is authentic and intense as the bad boy, but the brothers' Goofus-and-Gallant dichotomy needs to be less, well, black-and-white, and the supporting players are bland. Platinum is influenced by rap video (lots of slo-mo and bling bling), maybe too much--it trusts our attention spans so little that it repeats flashes of scenes that ran minutes before. But in the first episode, the show is adventurous and provocative enough to deserve a chance. In an easy-listening TV season, Platinum...
...rebellion to upper crust complacency. On “Fader Party” the Majesticons play defiant street rappers as they “count the funds / count my guns / count my sons / count my clout / count you out.” But by the time “Platinum BlaQue” arrives, they’ve begun to assimilate: “New Republic on the table with the New York Times / Used to read The Nation ’til I changed my mind / Used to study Marx; now I study wine.” Then come...