The news about Beat Crazy is that Joe Jackson has gone, uh, beat crazy. Having won his audience with a crisp, distinctive, brightly syncopated rock & roll sound, he now leaps into a new dimension of rhythm. Beat Crazy is an explosively percussive work that, in its brittle synthesis of African rhythms and Western contexts, sometimes recalls Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Jackson skips deftly across shifting sonic currents to create an LP that's about the interplay between opposites: black and white, male and female, mugger and muggee. Though the singer is by no means entirely surefooted, when he connects, he's uncommonly graceful and engaging.

I'm the Man. Jackson's second record, took a cynical, mocking look at the phenomenology of pop ("I can sell you anything," the artist boasted in the title tune), but Beat Crazy is a meditation on the rhythms of life. It pulses with the tensions of sex, race and class. Once again, Joe Jackson styles himself as the knowing, alienated chronicler of a certain underprivileged smart set: young London circa 1980. He sings about love and the chases and undercurrents that belie the surface appearances of placidity. He flirts with smugness and embitterment but is saved by the undeniable appeal of both the band he leads and the music he writes.

Beat Crazy (the album and the song) begins with a scream, then slips into a skittish, almost lilting rhythm that brings to mind a nightclub rendition of jungle abandon. Over an irresistibly sinuous mesh of drums, congas and a sprightly metallic guitar, Jackson mouths the sentiments of a disapproving parent: "They say the world is in a mess/But they can't talk the way they dress/...And if the Russians ever come/They'll all be beating Conga drums." This man sings like a snake charmer, his voice so twisted and insinuating that it lampoons the words even as it wraps itself around the melody.

In the next number. "One to One," the drums are suddenly replaced by an Elton John-style piano. Lyrically. we're whisked from older generation to younger. "One to One" is about a domestic squabble between a somewhat doctrinaire young woman and a guy who wants to know if it's sexist to say that she's cute when she's mad. In other compositions, we visit the neighbors (a model with too many men friends, an actor whose girlfriend is often heard screaming), hear from a seventeen-year-old voodoo master and listen to a harangue against "pretty boy" pop stars. Joe Jackson is a pop star, but he isn't particularly pretty in any sense of the word. He sees life in his quarter of London as bleakly as novelist Margaret Drabble views it in hers.

This pays off handsomely in a furious six-minute assault titled, in a gesture toward understatement, "Mad at You." Jackson is unquestionably singing about anger here–the thin, ominous bass line and stinging guitar chords make that perfectly clear–but he's formalized, stylized and so distanced himself from it that it's become positively celebratory. You can't stop dancing. Like the best of his peers (Elvis Costello, Johnny "Rotten" Lydon, the Clash), Joe Jackson is extremely adept at converting anger into art.

As a balladeer-sociologist, Jackson's record is a little spottier. Sometimes he's shrewd and witty. "Crime Don't Pay" is enlivened by a brief lyric that investigates an allegorical encounter between victim and perpetrator, while "Biology" is a wryly handled fertility dance about male release and the double standard. Other times, rather severe lapses in judgment occur. "Someone Up There," a heavy-handed and not overly original tune about fate, contains such clinkers as "Someone up there makes the wind and the rain." "Battleground" treats race relations in almost as banal a fashion and is further marred by an atonal vocal delivery that suggests the singer has confused his lyrics with poetry.

Indeed, there are moments when Joe Jackson sounds unable to decide whether he wants to be Britain's New Wave Billy Joel or its white Gil Scott-Heron. My advice to him is to go the Billy Joel route. That's where Jackson's not inconsiderable talents lie, and where he seems most able to transcend his limitations. (RS 331)

FRANK ROSE