Joey's bachelor party at Hard Rock
(5/29/04) Norm Clarke Las Vegas Review Journal

Body English sent a lot of sexy signals at Thursday's sneak preview.

Formerly known as Baby's, the Hard Rock Hotel's renovated nightclub rocked under a $250,000 Baccarat chandelier with a twist: a revolving disco ball.

Members of 'N Sync joined Joey Fatone at his bachelor party in "The parlor," a hidden VIP room with a two-way mirrored wall that allowed guests to watch the dance floor action.

Morning Call review: JC in Philly
(5/29/04) Len Righi The Morning Call (thanks charlidos!)

As a member of boy band supreme 'N Sync, JC Chasez could have coasted through his show Thursday night and the 600 or so teen and twentysomething fans at the Trocadero in Philadelphia likely wouldn't even have noticed.

But Chasez brought the sweat as well as the noise during his 85-minute set, performing almost all of his surprisingly good solo disc, ''Schizophrenic,'' and a cover of Prince's ''Let's Go Crazy.''

In fact, given the extensive amount of eye-popping, R-rated choreography — featuring four lissome female dancers who seem to have had most of their skeletons removed — Chasez's show was like a workout video co-produced by Playboy magazine and ''The Man Show.''

Backed by an enthusiastic five-piece band, which occasionally overpowered his singing, Chasez romped through ''All Day Long I Dream About Sex,'' the reggae-fied ''Everything You Want,'' the sexy club-night anthem ''Some Girls (Dance With Women)'' and the rocking closer, ''100 Ways.''

Costume changes and lighting effects further enhanced the music. The most striking example: ''Come to Me,'' during which black lights turned the masks on the dancers' faces lime green and their skimpy nurses uniforms ultra-blue, creating a fantastical, sexually charged dream-state atmosphere.

However, a couple of times Chasez had a brush with what his band mate Justin Timberlake would call a wardrobe malfunction. On ''One Night Stand'' he looked ridiculous tricked out like a pimp, and when he appeared in a ''Sgt. Pepper's'' style waistcoat for ''Blowin' Me Up,'' one young woman exclaimed, ''My God! It's Adam Ant!''

American pop culture ain't what it used to be
(5/29/04) Mark Brown Rocky Mountain News

...Finding Nemo is widely considered the biggest-selling DVD of all time, with some 15 million sold. Yet that's still only one in every 20 Americans. The Grammy winner for Album of the Year for 2003 also set a record for the lowest sales ever in the No. 1 slot of the Billboard Top 200 Chart.

"We actually had, for the first time since using Soundscan data, an album that was No. 1 with less than 90,000 units (in a week)," says Geoff Mayfield of Billboard.

That album was OutKast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below, selling only 86,000 albums in one week. Ultimately, the disc was one of the biggest albums of last year, selling 4.8 million copies to date.

The biggest-selling first week in music history belongs to NSYNC, which sold 2.4 million copies of No Strings Attached in its March 2000 debut week. Mayfield calculated it sold 4.5 copies a second that week. Still, less than 1 percent of Americans bought it.

Mayfield notes that some in the music industry are concerned about music's "lower standards for success" compared with the huge TV numbers.

"One million (in sales) compared to 293 million people is kinda slim," he says. "But music is a personal choice. I don't know if we expect to reach the kind of mass numbers (with one album) that you can reach with a large TV show or a large movie."

The top DVD sales each week consistently outsell the top CDs of the same week, Mayfield notes, "which is kind of a funny thing. If you buy an album you love, you'll probably experience it more than watching a movie..."