There's something comically irresistible about Joe Jackson. With his bulging eyes and puckered mouth perched precariously atop his impossibly lanky frame, he's like a Mad magazine caricature of someone whose every obsession is unrequited. On Look Sharp!, his first album, Jackson's close-minded, bulldog belligerence lacked punk-political overtones: it was, purely and simply, the anger of a man who saw the fact that he wasn't famous yet as a burning social injustice. His craving to establish himself as a major musical figure led him to shove all other considerations aside. Or, as Jackson himself puts it on I'm the Man: "I'm the guy with the big feet/But plenty of nerve."

Success hasn't exactly mellowed Jackson, but it has given him some needed stature. "On Your Radio," the new LP's opener, is a classic grade-school-revenge fantasy ("Ex-friends, ex-lovers and enemies.../You're gonna hear me on your radio") that'd be obnoxious if the singer didn't spend the rest of the record proving what he can do with his recent notoriety. Now that he's famous, Jackson's been freed from his mania for dramatizing himself, and his canny grasp of where the power is comes off a good deal sharper when it's no longer filtered through a screen of social-climbing rage. In the hard-reggae ballad, "Geraldine and John" (an acerbic sequel to "Happy Loving Couples"), he's still stiff-necked and self-righteous, but here he's subtle about it, reacting from a distance.

Overall, the music, though it remains derivative and broadly stroked, is more forceful and zesty than Look Sharp!'s. Jackson's vocals are as dogged and headstrong as ever, but he's finally let his band — sparked by Gary Sanford's careening guitar playing and Dave Houghton's thrashing, cymbal-happy drumming — have its say. And while he's still endearingly loutish ("Get That Girl" suggests that if the guy dancing with your girl is Joe Jackson, maybe the kids aren't all right after all), he now writes from other points of view, giving his work added depth. "It's Different for Girls" has an unexpected tenderness, and you're disappointed when the song seems to end with a put-down. In "Amateur Hour," the King of Spiv Rock muses: "The world could be a better place/If some of us could stay/Amateurs." Sure, those lines are double-edged—it's been a long time since Jackson was an amateur, in any sense of the word — but, considering their source, they're surprisingly conciliatory.

An even better fantasy than "On Your Radio," the title track is the most cartoonishly perfect self-advertisement that Jackson has yet written. Set to a jangling guitar and some subway-train percussion, "I'm the Man" (a tongue-in-cheek cop from David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World") presents the singer as the inventor of virtually every useless fad of the past decade, from skateboards to Jaws. Jackson rattles off his résumé as breathlessly as a politician bucking for president: "Kung Fu," he snarls. "That was one of my good ones." The odd thing is that while gleefully parodying himself as well as lampooning his own faddishness and ambition, he sounds more convincing and likable than ever.

I doubt that Joe Jackson will ever become the heavyweight he aspires to be, but if I worked for Schlitz, I'd put him on TV tomorrow, hawking gusto. (RS 306)

TOM CARSON