Joan Armatrading

Pop music has more than its share of loners and raffish individualists – mystics like Neil
Young, misanthropes like Randy Newman, melancholics like the late Nick Drake. Joan
Armatrading is a loner, too, but she's as matter-of-fact about it as she is about everything
else: she just likes to be by herself. "I wanna be a big shot/And have ninety cars," she sings
in the title tune of Me Myself I. "I wanna have a boyfriend/And a girl/For laughs/B... More >

The perennially unclassifiable London West Indian meets Instant Records' Richard Gottehrer for her punchiest and most attractive album--she even comes close to laughing a couple of times. The title tune is to narcissism as "Brown Sugar" is to racism--she doesn't prettify it, but she doesn't forswear its pleasures, either. Suggesting to this white male heterosexual that unclassifiable may be a polite way to say unreachable--and that unreachable may be why even songs as well-realized as these wouldn't take that extra pop leap if Gottehrer weren't motorvating them. (Grade: B+)