The title of Millie Jackson's new album may sound like a come-on, yet what's inside is more like a good scolding: intimate, bullying, funny and chastening. Jackson's early records had her portraying each side of one overheated romantic triangle after another. Then, last year's Live and Uncensored left her on her own. For Men Only builds off both of these roles. But the dominant tone is that of a...

Millie Jackson has referred to her records as "musical soap opera." Not so: the slick vapidity and easy emotion of soap opera are completely absent in her work. On Free and in Love, she defines tough, intelligent women involved in strained personal situations without once lapsing into self-pity or bathos.

Unlike her last two records, Free and in Love is not a concept album, and the comparatively...

And still gettin' it while the gettin' is still good. Those who enjoyed Caught Up, Millie Jackson's last song cycle, won't be disappointed by this new collection; those still unfamiliar with her will find this a good starting point, for Jackson is one of the most engaging characters to emerge in recent years.

Like its predecessor, Still Caught Up details a shaky marriage, the first side from the...

As feminism seeped out of the white middle class and into the black community in the early Seventies, it inspired a flurry of female singers who asserted their sexual independence and told off men (as well as other women) in no uncertain terms. Whereas Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin had sung in the Sixties about submission, suddenly the recurrent refrain was: "Mister Big Stuff/Who do you think you...