The Music

According to Billboard magazine, "The Heatseekers chart lists the best-selling titles by new and developing artists, defined as those who have never appeared in the top 100 of the Billboard 200 chart." 1 No One Does It Better Soul Decision STYLE The latest twist on "boy-band" pop, this time with occasional echoes of Motown resounding within the fashionably glossy production.

BEST CUTS "Next Time," "I Don't Need Anyone"

WORLDVIEW Puppy love and its discontents make the world go 'round.

ROLE MODEL STATUS With neither suggestive lyrics nor visible tattoos and only one earring among them, David Bowman, Trevor Guthrie, and Ken Lewko come off refreshingly unbesmirched in terms of both their form and their content.

BEST CUTS "Who Would've Thought," "Caribbean Medley"

WORLDVIEW Evangelically Christian.

ROLE MODEL STATUS "Donnie's ministry of his deliverance from sin and the miracle of his healing from leukemia has [sic] reached millions of countries [sic]," reads Mr. McClurkin's PR. "He is an inspiration to many and regularly appears before audiences led by Benny Hinn, Rod Parsley, [and] Bishop T.D. Jakes and at Azusa and Promise Keepers conventions."

BEST CUTS None.

WORLDVIEW It's a jungle out there in which only the fittest-i.e., those capable of turning the drugs, sex, and violence at the heart of "thug life" to their own financial and social advantage-survive.

ROLE MODEL STATUS Three liner thanks go to "Allah" and two to "God," but the "gangsta" obscenities and crudities in the "songs" obscure whatever piety may lurk in the hearts of the Figgas themselves.

BEST CUTS "Wasted," "Subtract You," "The Hell That Is My Life"

WORLDVIEW The obsession isn't so much with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll as with the way such "solutions" end up causing even more pain from which to seek refuge.

ROLE MODEL STATUS The Democratic Party may have foresworn Playboy, but Zebrahead hasn't, not with an actual bikini-clad "playmate" on the cover and a link to Playboy merchandise at the Zebrahead website.

BEST CUTS "23rd Psalm," "Voice of Jah"

WORLDVIEW Devoutly Rastafarian, with a special aversion to war ("Guns and Bombs") and famine ("Sudan") and a special affection for Scripture, interpreted his way.

ROLE MODEL STATUS Having spent the last seven years outgrowing his youthful reputation for sexually and socially abrasive lyrics and stances, Mr. Banton has become a respected practitioner of Rastafarianism and an advocate of politically correct solutions (i.e., condom usage) to global crises (i.e., AIDS).

Marshall Crenshaw has made a career of being a "heatseeker": After 20 years of wowing critics, the 46-year-old Detroit native remains better known to the public for portraying John Lennon (Beatlemania) and Buddy Holly (La Bamba) than for any of the 10 albums he's recorded under his own name. The Best of Marshall Crenshaw: This Is Easy (Rhino/Warner Archives), a 22-track overview of Mr. Crenshaw's greatest misses, suggests that his commercial failure has more to do with the inability of a trend-obsessed music industry to market timeless music than with the music itself. His formula is simple. He sets perennial rock 'n' roll subjects such as the elusiveness of love and the inevitability of heartbreak to bright guitars, rockabilly-based backbeats, and irresistible sing-along choruses while resisting raunch, delusions of political grandeur, and other artistically debilitating flights of fancy. He focuses instead on rock 'n' roll's capacity to locate the eternal in even the most ephemeral of yearnings. In his way, Mr. Crenshaw may yet do as much for the music that John Lennon and Buddy Holly taught him to love as John Lennon and Buddy Holly themselves lived to do.