Consumer Guide Album

Arrested Development: Zingalamaduni [Chrysalis/ERG, 1994]
Will someone in the chart department tell us the last time the follow-up to a number-one album endured only eight weeks on the Billboard 200, topping out at 55? Although it's still alive on the r&b list, which they can claim proves a racial militance that was never in doubt or the point, this looks like a stiff of historical proportions, more evidence that their short-term commercial success was a long-term musical fraud--limp, sententious rap feel-goodism quickly forgotten once it failed to drive the scary stuff away. Maybe in another three years, five months, and two days they'll come up with another slice of life like "Tennessee"--or another guilt trip like "Mr. Wendal." But they don't have that long. C+