Consumer Guide Album

The Lion King [Walt Disney, 1994]
The Afropop Fund has less of a beef than do parents and plain old pop fans--better secondhand mbube jive (Mbongemi Ngema simulating pan-Africana) than thirdhand razzmatazz (Elton John and Tim Rice dusting off the big themes, dull hooks, and Jungle Book shtick). With half an exception for Nathan Lane's meerkat, the voices are even more negligible than the songs, which number five in all--it takes three Elton versions plus four Eurocentric instrumentals to bring a lousy EP up to 12 tracks. C