Body & Soul

by William RuhlmannThe bottom fell out of Rick Astley's recording career with this, his fourth album, which peaked at #185 during its sole week in the Billboard 200. The single "Hopelessly" managed an anemic #28 in the Hot 100, while climbing to #4 in the adult contemporary chart. But easy listening is not where a boy toy like Astley (who fills his CD booklet with cheesecake shots) wants to be. He wants to be in the buzz bin on MTV, and no wonder -- he has nowhere to go otherwise but to start working his way up as a lounge act in Vegas, an evil fate to contemplate when you're only 27 and you've been on bedroom walls all over the Western world for five years. That's show biz.