Young feminists with gentle souls have long idolized Joan Armatrading for her broodingly personal lyrics, the indeterminate gender of her love objects and her musical independence, but she has always insisted in interviews on disassociating herself from the content of her songs. As if to further separate herself from her material, she opens her new album, The Key, with a blatantly fictional, feisty song, "Call Me Names": "I can't wait to see you again. I know you're gonna slap my face You beat me up then beat me again/ And over and over and over and over and over and over/I love it when you call me names." I can't help thinking it's part of producer Steve Lillywhite's campaign to toughen Armatrading up, to give her the patina of punky hostility that makes technopop bands so popular on MTV.

For more than ten years, Armatrading has remained a commercially marginal cult figure, and on The Key, she seems to have decided to part with the one thing standing between her and success: her originality. The album has several pleasantly energetic tunes ("Drop the Pilot," produced by Val Garay, and "Tell Tale") that anybody could have written. And both her dramatic monologues ("The Dealer") and her love songs ("I Love My Baby," "Everybody Gotta Know") traffic in the kind of musical and lyrical chchés she previously has always avoided or transcended. The exceptions to this mediocrity are "Call Me Names," extreme enough to remain outstanding, and the title cut, with its hide-and-seek rhythm. Perhaps Armatrading means to explain her bid for mass acceptance when, in "Everybody Gotta Know," she says, "Sometimes I think I've told it all so plainly/But there's no one there to hear the words I say." (RS 397)

DON SHEWEY