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It Was All A Dream Dream Bad Boy Records, 2001
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Reviewed by Sienna Powers
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There are precedents. A lot of them. The group that started the current wave of manufactured girl band success, The Spice Girls, ably demonstrated what skeptics thought couldn't happen in our modern, enlightened age: to, practically in full view of the camera and the PR machine, take a handful of talented but unconnected individuals and create them as a single entity. Since Spice fever hit, of course, agents and managers have been scrambling to put together the next big thing. Girl bands and boy bands, both, but with the sort of bankability on which legends hang. It must be a little like trying to stuff youth or even sex into a bottle in order to bring it to market. You can put together all of the elements, but how do you define the undefinable? How can you seem to follow the Spice Girl formula almost to the letter and then come up with a group as forgettable as, say, Innosense or as trite and banal as Westlife? The also-rans have been legion and some of them so forgettable they hardly seem worth mentioning. On the other hand, there have been a handful of groups who have been formed in this way who have found their own level and a handful of these have even screamed to the top with a bullet. The Monkees get the distinction of being the first "rock" band created in this way: chosen for small screen presence (Would the girls scream? If the girls screamed, would it be believable?) more than musical ability, Mike, Davey, Mickey and Peter will keep rockin' in reruns as long as we have analog tape devices left on the planet with which to rerun them. The aforementioned Spice Girls came about as close to achieving supergroup status as could be imagined for "musicians" who seemed to have been chosen for how successfully they could change outfits during their shows. Backstreet Boys, TLC... the list goes on. Though, of course, not as long as the list of those who tried and failed. The manufactured, created groups who haven't failed are connected by an invisible thread. Sure, talent is a piece of this, but not all. After all, it's most often: Untalented need not apply. And if the order of the day is "Audition to be a star," those doing the choosing will have a good field to pick from. Proven management isn't insurance: even boy band superman Lou (Backstreet Boys, N' Sync, O-Town) Pearlman has had a few turkeys. Good material: sure. But what well-backed group doesn't have the best material that money can buy? Personality doesn't seem to be key, although it can be a component, even if sometimes the personalities we're presented with smack of spin. There are, of course, no easy answers. If there were, we wouldn't have to suffer the duds to get to the groups that have managed to pull off some semblance of the bottling. And, against all odds and with more wannabes than you can count, Dream seems to have managed to pull the ingredients together into something good enough to sell. Dream's debut album, It Was All A Dream, delivers on the promise of the group's 2000 single, "He Loves U Not," with a tight, danceable and listenable album stuffed with, well, good stuff. Although the 17 tracks on It Was All A Dream include a couple of intros, a remix and a few interludes, it's refreshing to see an album aimed at this market with more tracks than the requisite 11 that make an album. And none of it reads like throwaway tracks: even the intros add cohesion to the whole. The interlude "Jordan," for instance, is 1:52 of each Dream girl leaving messages on someone named Jordan's answering machine. Jordan has obviously blown them all off and the messages get increasingly hostile, ending with Ashley telling Jordan in no uncertain terms that such behavior is unacceptable to Ashley and "my girls." It's an amusing enough interlude: it helps establish the girls as individuals and, more importantly to the album, it provides a very good segue into Dream's excellent cover of Ray Parker Jr.'s "Mr. Telephone Man," which was originally recorded in 1983. Quickly signed to Sean Comb's Bad Boy Records, Dream is Puff Daddy's first attempt at cashing in on the teen group phenomenon. Combs' involvement with the group might account for the solidity of this early effort. Combs knows the music business very well and he understands what it takes to punch something beyond the banal. It seems likely that Dream will take a quick lead in a packed field. | March 2001
Sienna Powers is a writer, editor and visual artist. |
Quickly signed to Sean Comb's Bad Boy Records, Dream is Puff Daddy's first attempt at cashing in on the teen group phenomenon. Combs' involvement with the group might account for the solidity of this early effort. Combs knows the music business very well and he understands what it takes to punch something beyond the banal. |
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