"Pop music has become so safe, so predictable and so carefully planned, it's easy to imagine major-label scientists, lured away from England and Japan and placed in teams deep within secret, underground pop music laboratories. They're down there, trying to derive the formula that will yield, time and time again, the perfect pop song.

"They almost succeeded with Michael Jackson. But Jackson's hair caught on fire during a Pepsi commercial in 1984. After that, he got all weird on them, and the formula was lost. Then came Mariah Carey and her shocking, inexplicable string of No. 1 hits. But somebody input the set of numbers that proved the exception to the rule right around the time Glitter came out, setting back the bigs' research another decade or so.

"Sometime while major-label scientists were working their mojo on Mariah, Stephen Jones, aka Baby Bird, found the elusive formula under his bed. Equipped only with a four-track tape recorder, a drum machine, guitar, bass and cheap synths, Jones recorded some 400 instrumentals and songs between 1989 and 1994, largely to stave off boredom."

Babybird (an example of how a record review can make the reader want to hear unfamiliar music)   ¶ 12/24/2002 11:38:00 AM