Will Iceberg Strike Twice for ‘Titanic’ Team?

Can the “Titanic” crew sail to the top of the charts again?

Singer Celine Dion, composer James Horner and lyricist Will Jennings--the trio responsible for the “Titanic” theme “My Heart Will Go On”--have recorded another romantic ballad for the soundtrack to “Bicentennial Man,” which is due in theaters on Christmas Day.

Sources close to the project say that the deal is all but completed to bring the new song to the movie, which stars Robin Williams.

As with “My Heart,” the track will be the only song on an otherwise instrumental, Horner-composed score and album (to be released by Sony Classics, which also did “Titanic”). The song will also be included on Dion’s upcoming 550 Records’ greatest-hits collection, as “My Heart” was on her 1997 album “Let’s Talk About Love.”

But it seems unrealistic to expect the “Bicentennial Man” soundtrack album to even approach the level of the “Titanic” package, which sold almost 10 million copies in the U.S. alone, according to SoundScan.

Many factors combined to make the “Titanic” movie and its music so big. Horner’s Celtic-derived tunes tapped into the same romance/tragedy/history mystique that led people to see the film over and over. “Bicentennial Man” is as different a story as Williams--playing a robot who yearns to become human--is a different kind of leading man from Leonardo DiCaprio.

“[“Titanic”] was a great big movie, and the music was a perfect fit,” says Bob Feterl, Southern California regional manager for Tower Records stores. “But the potential [of the new Dion-Horner-Jennings teaming] is still huge.”

Yet he believes that the song will contribute more to the sales of the Dion album than the soundtrack collection.

“I would think that her greatest-hits package with this song on it has the greatest upside,” he says.

KURUPTION: The rifts in the old West Coast rap Dogg Pound and Chronic crews seemed too big to mend in the aftermath of the split between Death Row founder Suge Knight and star producer Dr. Dre a few years ago.

But it’s all coming back together, not just in Dre’s upcoming “Chronic 2001” album, but also on “The Streetz Iz a Mutha” by Dogg Pound stalwart Kurupt, due Nov. 2 from the ANTRA label, which has aligned with former Mercury chair Danny Goldberg’s new Artemis Records.

In fact, Kurupt says, reconvening nearly the entire cast of the Dogg Pound, which came together around Snoop Dogg in the early ‘90s, went so smoothly earlier in the summer that recording the whole album took less than one month.

“I wanted to show how strong we are when we’re all together,” says the rapper. “Not just to each other, but to the world.”

He says that only two members of the old Dogg Pound, the Lady Rage and RBX, are absent, and not because of any problems but because they were involved in other projects and couldn’t make the time.

Why the sudden resurgence of the Dre-initiated G-funk style?

“One thing my father and mother taught me is if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the Philadelphia-born Kurupt says. “The sound was never broke--just the connection of the people who made it. If you listen to a lot of music people make today, it’s really the Dr. Dre sound. We didn’t go anywhere, just we were all on our own mission and we should have been sticking with what made us the best.”

Kurupt is also working on another project, supervising and assembling the soundtrack to “Once in a Lifetime,” a film that marks actor Laurence Fishburne’s directorial debut. Kurupt and partners Daz and G-Bone have recruited artists ranging from Lenny Kravitz to the Organized Noize team to contribute new songs, as well as recording new music of their own.

“The West Coast is really on one,” Kurupt says. “We’re all pulling our things together. It’s going to be an exciting 2000 for California.”

WONDERFUL: One major artist conspicuously absent from the boxed-set world since the advent of CDs has been Stevie Wonder. Until now.

“It’s finally happening,” says Harry Weigner, who as director of A&R; for the Universal Music Group (which now includes Motown) has assembled “The Wonder Years: The Close of a Century,” due in late November. The four-disc set covers Wonder’s career from 11-year-old prodigy to the present.

“He’ll be 50 next year, and this is an overview of his career,” says Weigner.

One rarity is Wonder’s original version of “Until You Come Back to Me,” which was available only briefly in the ‘70s as part of an anthology. The song was later recorded by Aretha Franklin.

While this is a definitive collection of Wonder’s hits and album tracks, it is not a look into the vaults for unreleased material from his ‘70s creative peaks--tapes that are in Wonder’s hands.

THE PAPER CHASE: Tori Amos supports a lot of causes. But she, or at least her record company, is not serving the environment too well with the promotional campaign for her upcoming album, “To Venus and Back.”

Accompanying advance copies of the album that Atlantic Records sent to some members of the media was a bound volume collecting all the company’s press releases on the singer since her solo debut album in 1992--totaling 104 pages, all using only one side of the paper. And wait, that’s not all. There was also a stapled set of press clippings adding up to another 95 pages.

The good news is that it’s easy to remove the binding and staples and recycle the paper in printers with the blank sides. Hey! Maybe it was environmentally responsible after all.