The Pretenders II : Pretenders : Review : Rolling Stone

Pretenders II is likely to put off a lot of people. It lacks the brittle drive of the debut album, and the loaded sexual provocation. It's less single-mindedly focused. And yet it's a record to exult over–passionate, recklessly engaged and, in some ways, far richer than its predecessor. The reason is simple: Chrissie Hynde.

The key to the Pretenders' music has never been their music. The band's sound is distinctive but mostly for its archness, and the playing doesn't evoke much except a nervousness as random as fingers drumming on a table. Nor is Hynde, by any formal yardstick, a great singer: her pitch is dubious, her ability to sustain a melody questionable. What counts is her ability to project herself as a personality, to turn herself into the heroine of her own life and make it compelling to the big audience. This is what great rock & rollers have always done.

On the first LP, Hynde's personality was based almost entirely upon her sexuality, which, as a stratagem, worked sensationally. Pretenders was so charged that listening to it was like having to watch your girlfriend get it on with another man. Yet sex gave this artist an inside track on themes that even Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell had treated only under the guise of romance. For Chrissie Hynde, sex was an endless journey – a will to power and a search for faith, the real war in all human relations. Pretenders was often cheap and tawdry, but to Hynde, tawdriness was where the meat was, and the best way to put across her truths.

Much of the debut album's feverish energy also came from Hynde's feral ambition: few rockers find it so crucial to justify themselves by making their mark in public. Few rockers, too, depend as deeply on having succeeded at becoming a star as Hynde does on Pretenders II. Her new sense of place – fame is the home she's always looked for–grants her new authority: she can explore herself in a more complex manner than ever before and send out fresh messages.

But though the subjects may be somewhat different, the trip goes on. Chrissie Hynde's basic role is that of an adventuress. She's a pop descendant of the Faustian heroines in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels, and of the expatriate seekers in Henry James', and she instinctively exploits the part's mythic and or trashy overtones even as she rebels against being trapped by its stereotypes. All of the record's separate motifs–love and sex; the dislocations of stardom, freedom and exile – dovetail into that double game.

Still, sexual relationships are the LP's main theme: more painful, adult versions than the cocky power ploys of Pretenders. The deflations of the first album's "Up the Neck" were pure strut, but the lyricism of "I laughed in my bed/At the stupid things you said," in Pretenders II's "Birds of Paradise," is an authentic recapturing of lost time. Acting out a fantasy of the ultrafree modern woman, Hynde is trapped between her paradoxically old-fashioned morality and her pride that the new life she's chosen is better and braver than the alternatives. The very excess of "The Adultress" (sic) suggests how strongly felt the guilt is, yet in the same situation in "Jealous Dogs," she's just as passionately defending herself against the rabble at the door.

Every cut is made vivid by Hynde's intense desire to give voice to the meanings of her experience – a gift she now extends outside herself as well. What's so wonderful about "Talk of the Town," for example, is how beautifully she grasps the rapturousness of success: she's the girl who got left behind, but she's also the boy who's changed his place in the world, and we understand them both. "Pack It Up" succeeds where fifty other put-downs of Hollywood hustlers don't, first because it's hilarious, then because there's a great rant in the middle – about finding new lovers and new enemies – that comes right from the heart of Hynde's questing nature.

As a singer, Chrissie Hynde only pretends to be outspoken – emotionally, she's the most elusive of vocalists. If the mood turns vulnerable, her voice will go tight with scorn. Or, in the middle of a harsh passage, she'll be unexpectedly, breathily tender. Her singing is a series of brilliant defense mechanisms: the self-protection of someone who was fundamentally an innocent but had to learn too many tricks to ever trust sincerity completely again.

Hynde's constant shifting captures her ambiguities perfectly, just as the music's jittery rhythms jell in context – that arch nervousness, after all, is what the lyrics are all about. The star's edgy rhythm guitar defines the search at the center of each number, while the band provides the bash and clatter needed to spur the singer on.

Pretenders II does have its flaws. Chrissie Hynde's obsessive approach often impels her to deal in the trashiest pop terms, and sometimes she can't rise above them. A ?? like "Bad Boys Get Spanked" seems meant to be contemptuous of people who'd find such an idea arousing, but the song doesn't always make that clear. And a couple of tunes – "Louie Louie," for instance – though winning, don't quite come off. But this is a brave record and a good one: the fiercely ambitious work of a woman determined, by whatever means, to make herself the greatest heroine in the history of rock & roll. The odds are certainly against her. I hope she makes it.