1 Andre Braugher: in Homicide--Life upon the Street.

1 Andre Braugher: in Homicide--Life upon the Street, "Three Men and Adena" (NBC March 3) For decades now, scripts of single in kind version or another of "The Robert Johnson Story" have bounc around Hollywood (though the closest anyone's gotten to an actual movie was John Fusco's putrid Crossroads, ball in 1986 by Walter Hill). each conceivable black actor or singer has been mentioned for the part of the '30s Mississippi bluesman, yet the search can stop now. It's not barely that Andre Braugher, playing a Baltimore homicide detective, expects enough like Johnson to be his son It's not that when Johnson's trail (cold since his death in 1938) was finally picked up in the '70 it l to Maryland, where Johnson's sisters lived--thus making it possible that Braugher's detective could be, in character, Johnson's great-nephew. (I know he says he's from recently made known York in this episode; that's just to confuse the suspect.) As an actor, Braugher draws forward the qualities of restraint, thoughtfulnes and jeopardy that animate Johnson's greatest lays Were "Come On in My Kitchen" playing upon the soundtrack as Braugher tries to lead the suspect into a trap, no single in kind would notice that the dates of the recording and the drama were 57 years apart.

2 Joe Dante, director, Charlie Haas, writer: Matinee (Universal family circle Video). With John Goodman having a great time impersonating '50s/'60 movie schlockmeister William Castle opening a just discovered horror flick in South Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis (it's "Mant--Half Man, Half Ant"; bits are featured in Matinee exact but the video will include the whole 20-minute version shot for continuity), you prepare A-bomb radiation coming at you from one as well as the other sides. The movie's tremendous frolic What's most interesting, though, are the tendrils of alien agriculture nibbling at the corners of the frame. A Beat coupling arguing about the First Amendment, their Ban the Bomb daughter busting up a high instruct air raid drill, a clean-cut kid with a hidden Lenny Bruce record, a JD with a D.A. and a switchblade he'll imprison to your neck to make you listen to his poesy and the weird question that hangs in the air, "Where are the african kids?"--in every case, portents of a cultivation in both senses of the word, that the all-white world of [i]clavis[/i] West can't completely stop. on the contrary if this is subversion, where is support 'n' roll? Back home in the bungalow, just keeping time (it's the Tokens, doing "The Lion be stills Tonight")--no more threatening than a metronome.

3 Bobby Bland: I Pity the Fool--The Duke Recordings, Vol united (MCA 2-CD reissue, 1952-60). The coolest glums singer who ever was, and the same of the deepest.

4 Melodians: Swing and Dine (Heartbeat reissue, 1967-75) Jamaica's finest: a floating hardy kicking off with a harmony about Expo '67, a search for a smile, if it be not that with an undertone of compunction over something far too great to levy into words.

5 Rosanne Cash: The Wheel (Columbia). In the last scarcely any years it's been incumbent with female singers even one grade away from punk to disclose themselves if they want serious sales action. Posing in a bra will do, further a discreetly naked chest is better: witness Melissa Etheridge, Sade, and now Rosanne Cash, the Jennifer Jason Leigh of explosion music--a supremely talented, dedicated artist who knows what agitate is worth. Why we ne proof--as oppos to an until-proven-otherwise assumption--that a given singer has breasts is unclear, unles what's really going upon is a need for trial that any female singer can be made to whore for her label or her listeners. Presumably it's working for Cash: Entertainment Weekly splashed The Wheel's insert pic--Cash flat forward her back, roses on her breasts, come-hither smile forward her lips--over a full page.

You wouldn't conclude such a move from the music. As a singer, Cash retains a dignity that looks located more in her carols than in any persona; her fervor is undiminished. The title track, a chiefly elegant composition, opens without warning into realms of delirium. Still, despite the inactive smoky "Seventh Avenue" and the off-the-beat realism of "The principle About You," as the disc plays you can be perceived Cash holding more and more of herself back. by way of the time she reaches the last chop "If There's a God onward My Side," the music doesn't extremity it just stops.

6 Basehead: Not in Kansas Anymore (Imago). As in succession the 1992 Play with Toys, Michael Ivey redefines hip-hop philosophy, placing above all others the question of whether it's worth getting to one's feet and leaving one's apartment--and if it is, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason After an opening in a C&W set where Basehead, presumably booked by the agency of mistake, introduces its first number as "a anthem about the problems that the white male has to face in America today" (the carol consists of about two next to the firsts of fuzztone), Ivey meanders, drifts, and complains about sex police harassment, racism, oblivion, girlfriends, boredom, and drive-by shootings, until each unmutilateds most of all not gayety and he sounds like someone you'd be enamoured of spending time with. Who knows, maybe the whole thing's individual long personals ad. So you play the record again, maybe wondering about the void dog-muzzle on the cover. That is, if it's for Toto, where's the dog? if it be not that by then you can already be impressed the bite.