DAVID BOWIE Let’s Dance (EMI America)

by Michael Davis

The arrival of a new David Bowie album usually means the arrival of a new David Bowie as well, and this time around is no exception. Speculation has reached a fever pitch concerning this new persona. After several recent bizarre stage and screen roles—The Elephant Man, Baal, a prisoner of war, a gigolo, a vampire’s lover—not to mention his connection with Cat People, real people are wondering what new image he’ll come up with for the next step in his musical career. The envelope, please.

The David Bowie of 1983 is...a Concerned Parent. He tells us that he wants to leave his nightmares behind and create inspirational music so his son can grow up in a better world. He thinks people should try to live together and treat each other better. David Bowie has grown up himself and is sounding quite normal. Is that kinky enough for you?

Of course, that’s just the Bowie who surfaces when confronted by presspersons armed with questions and microphones. When he’s confronted with musicians, recording studios, contracts, and his own motivations about returning to the world of music, other aspects of the man emerge. Like this album.

Sometimes Bowie’s press-speak matches,up with the vinyl evidence but sometimes.. .1 mean, he says stuff like he feels no need to be experimental at the moment but what does he think he cooked up at the Power Station, a normal dance record? Ha.

What he’s done is to connect up with Chic’s Nile Rodgers. Evidently, they share a liking for both current dance grooves and the buoyant horn

charts common to ’50s R&B, so they decided to marry them and then graft on the guitar licks of Stevie Ray Vaughan which are right outa bluesmen like Albert King and T. Bone Walker. All these styles may have originally developed organically but they’ve never been put together like this before. The resulting hybrids are definitely a mixed breed; some of ’em can boogie right off the table while other just lie there and twitch a bit.

The strong stuff is really alive, making most modern dance music sound positively moribund in comparison. The bright, peppy “Modem Love” opens things up with a “Young Americans”-like explosiveness, even if the lyrics do point to a distrust of modernity. And how could anyone fault “Let’s Dance”? The beat swaggers irresistibly, inspiring sharp guitar spurts and a horn arrangement that oughtta send the likes of Dexys and ABC scurrying back to the drawing board. David may not be overtly saying a whole lot here but a look back to Scary Monsters can be revealing; the last two tunes can be compressed into, “So I’ll dance my life away/And it’s no game,” a fair statement of this album’s underlying theme.

For each success, there is a flip side, however. “Shake It” is a followup to “Let’s Dance” right down the line, which means it’s inferior right down the line. “Without You,” on

the other hand, effectively mirrors the gentle sweetness of a brief affair but has just about as much staying power. Then there’s “Ricochet,” easily the most perplexing thing here; it’s got great rhythm and fine antidrudgery sentiments but the two seem to coexist in the same space without really combining to form a song.

Actual songs seem to be at a premium here, so Bowie offers tightened arrangements to a couple of worthy older tunes you might not be familiar with. His treatment of Metro’s “Criminal World” is completely in character—Metro were a stylish, whispery group, after all— but I don’t know about the way he deals with his and Iggy Pop’s “China Girl.”

First released on The Idiot (now only available as an import; thanks, RCA), “China Girl” was one of Iggy’s post-Stooges classics, a tale of conquest on both personal and social levels. Iggy’s vocal intensity left no doubt that he knew all too well the horrors behind the whites of his own eyeballs; in contrast, Bowie’s more controlled delivery, which stresses the calm after/before the storm mood of the last verse, doesn’t have nearly the impact of the original. If he’s trying to concentrate on uplifting music, why tackle the nightmares at all? And once he made the decision to do the song, why’d he nambypamby around it?

The thing is, Bowie holds virtually nothing back for his remake of “Putting Out Fire” (which could function as a theme for The Hunger as well as Cat People, strangely enough). Starting slowly, like a feline stretching its muscles before ripping its prey apart, the song seethes with equal parts of power, grace and anguish. Bowie lets loose with his most impassioned singing on the album while Vaughan’s incendiary guitar solos spark some fires of his own.

If all this adds up to inconsistency, well, David Bowie’s been consistently inconsistent for his entire career and it’s no snap switching one’s artistic focus 180 degrees from a freaked-out style sampler to a responsible adult, even in rock ’n’ roll. Make that especially in rock ’n’ roll. Hell, he’s even admitted in print that he’s really satisfied with the feel of only a few of these tracks and that he’s got to knuckle down to make this direction work. That’s a real, uh, mature attitude to take and one that implies a commitment that goes beyond monetary considerations. Can rock’s foremost chameleon settle down and still make exciting music? I dunno, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised—as long as he doesn’t keep running off to the movies all the time.

MEN AT WORK Cargo (Columbia)

Sure, I like Men At Work too. Doesn’t everybody? They seem able to please all the people all the time, even though that’s not their grand pop-scheme design, as far as I can tell. Instead, the right group of guys with the right background (namely Australia, that halfcaste child of England and America) happened to come together at the right time to appeal to millions (through their own natural selves).

Much has been made in the press over Men At Work as the “intelligent” spearhead of an Australian Invasion, as though Oz had sent us nobody but dopes like Peter Allen until last year. We’ve actually had plenty of opportunities to grab for Australia’s pop smarts before Men At Work (don’t let me get started about how we criminally ignored the Sports’ brilliance in 1979-80), but no Australpoppers until them have presented their intelligence in such an accessible package.

And Men At Work are very very good at the hip/affable synthesis game. Take their new Cargo’s first big single, “Overkill,” which at bottom is Colin Hay whining about all his newfound loss-of-self pressures as a pop idol, and yet it never really sounds like whining, thanks to its jaunty pop melody, and all those deft Men At Work trademark touches: Greg Ham’s ghost-glide sax, moodysoft echo, Hay’s eternally warm & smart vocal presence. All in all, a kind of “overkill” of agreeableness.

Same sensibility at work on Cargo’s other , early single success, “Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive,” a more “humorous” number (but not so funny as the Kinksish “Be Good Johnny” and “Down Under” were) that seems heartily cliched on the face of it. Pop reflections on schizophrenia are nothing new of course, and even the Jekyll & Hyde remake of the title sounds vaguely familiar: didn’t somebody as dismal as England Dan & John Ford Coley do a title along that line a few years Yet the song mostly works, through features as irrelevant as Colin Hay’s casually laborious pronunciation of “la-BOR-a-try.” It’s hardly

a great song, and yet I can feel some muted admiration for Men At Work’s nonchalant intelligence in putting it over.

Cargo holds few surprises for those already familiar with Business As Usual, even as it shows Men At Work subtly deepening the platinumcertified approach of that album. There are many “answer” songs loaded aboard: Ron Strykert’s “Settle Down My Boy” is easy-rolling parent dogma to a slightly older Johnny, while Hay’s “Upstairs In My House” finds the main Man as secure/anxious in his own flat as he was in “Who Can It Be Now?”

“It’s A Mistake” is the softcore antiwar tune (everybody’s doing this year). And Hay seems already nostalgic for the band’s cheekier early-Melbourne struggles in “No Restrictions,” and Strykert’s “I Like

To” delivers more of the probable rock ’n’ bump burples of those scuffling days. I’m sure he’s a fun guy and all that (the eyes have it), but Hay could, I think, get rather maudlin on us in years to come. For now though, Men At Work’s smart/bland balance seems firmly in control of itself;

“I may be an idiot but indeed I am no fool,” Colin Hay sings in “High Wire,” and while that’s not exactly a punk credo to carve into your chest for the ages, it explains real well why they’re The Men and why they’ll inevitably be with us for a long run (nobody don’t like ’em).

Richard Riegel

THE BELLE STARS (Warner Bros.)

There’s no lack of traumatic incident on The Belle Stars’ first album: lovers treat each other abominably, separate, commit crimes of passion. But the overall tone is curiously matter-of-fact, making no drastic distinction between these intimate revelations and the intricate calisthenics of “The Clapping Song.” Shoot your boyfriend, clap your partner’s right palm with you right palm. We’re strong in bed, we’re weak in love, yeah yeah yeah do the Harlem Shuffle. It isn’t so much that these seven women (they wrote six of the

LP s songs collectively, credited in alphabetical order) don’t let anything faze them, more that their sighs and whimpers are cushioned by a layer of pure pep. Judy Parsons’ deep-dish drumming, Sarah-Jane Owen’s clangy guitar playing and the casually suggestive singing of Jennie McKeown ride on the top of a teaberry-shuffle, New Year’s Eve noisemaker ambience, and much of the LP hits the note of frivolous practicality that’s always been the hallmark of girl-pop.

Frivolous in attitude, that is, and practical in intent. Pop is used as much for its instructional value—it teaches how to want (or be wanted), how to lose out, how to do the latest dance steps—for its guidelines to acceptable behavior, as for its “entertainment,” and th^ Belle Stars are in a two-decades-down-the-line tradition of a form that was chock-full of social coding. “Baby I’m Yours” replicates the ancient attitudes (don’t worry if you see me talking with some other guy, ’cause my heart belongs to you and you alone), and the hazy “Indian Summer” is Shangri-Las/Robin Ward “damn Labor Day” wistfulness and regret. The Latinish “Ci Ya Ya” contains a bit of prototypical choruscommentary (“Who’s she with?,” the girls ask of a would-be rival) to go alongside its assertion of , independence, while “Sign Of The Times” updates the break-up song for readers of Self (or, in England, Over 21 and Options): “Why do we go on with this useless love affair?,” McKeown queries, before acknowledging that a nifty sex life doesn’t make up for no genuine commitment, and telling the fellow “it’s time to live my life without you.” On “The Reason,” as indicated previously, the signer simply kills the chap.

Even the silliest songs, as the Belle Stars point out by their choice of six novelty or near-novelty oldies to cover on their LP, can be made to fit into the overall girlgroup process, the way incongruous accessories can become The Right Look if carried off with style. There’s no problem with the songs they dig up. “Iko Iko,” “The Clapping Song” and “Mockingbird” are all dumb-ditties that are inspired nonsense, nursery rhymes as expressions of love and exuberance, and catchy by definition. One might wish, however, for a little more expressiveness to go along with the busybee percussive activity, a little less parochial school cheerleader in the unison vocals. And the first time I heard their “Needle In A Haystack” on the radio I wondered why the track was missing from my test pressing of the Bananarama album; appropriate as the song’s cautionary selectivity may be in these sexually baffling times, the Velvelettes don’t warrant two modem-music covers of their twoand-only hits (the ’Ramas do “He Was Really Sayifr Somethin ) in as many months.

Two outside tunes are worth special mention*, as McKeown and the sextet of instrumentalists bring out the lascivious content in AI Wilson’s “The Snake” and Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle,” both of which make up for in slithery insinuation what they’re missing in soul. “The Snake” is a fairly blatant allegory about sexual betrayal: a woman takes a frozen reptile to her warm bosom, strokes it and defrosts it, whereupon it bites her. “You knew damn well I was a snake,” it says, “before you took me in.” Meanwhile, the saxophone does some snakecharming of its own. Less sinister is “Harlem Shuffle,” one of those “this is how you do this dance” numbers that really means nothing of the sort. Prim vocals only emphasize the real going-on: don’t move too fast, just make it last, slide it to the left, I can’t stand it no more, etc.

There’s nothing new about the kind of innocence mixed with sexiness that the Belle Stars offer up (or, for that matter, about the marketing calculation that seems to lie behind it), but there’s nothing stale about it either. As long as there are mirrors in girls’ bedrooms, and boys who wish they were in girls’ bedrooms, there’ll be a place for the frisky playacting of groups like the Belle Stars.

Mitchell Cohen

NRBQ Grooves In Orbit (Bearsville)

As the perennial Little Bar Band That Could, NRBQ occupies a special niche. After all, they’ve ex-

isted in basically this form and with basically this orientation for close to 15 years now, and with little or no record company support. So the real Surprise is not that they’ve forged a fairly distinct identity and sound— what band working that long wouldn’t?—but that they’ve managed to keep going at all.

But, having granted them that— plus the occasional bona fide anthem a la “Me And The Boys”—see what else the real attraction is. The classic bar-band sound is a noble and desirable calling, and is also becoming an endangered species—bar bands today don’t play blues, country, rockabilly, R&B, and early rock ’n’ roll forms, they play recent Rolling Stones, John Cougar and Billy Squier. NRBQ doesn’t do that, but

they dfO (at least on most albums, including this one) strike an uneasy balance that romanticizes this brand of music in a most self-conscious and self-indulgent way. This may be an understandable reaction to the industry’s insistence on massmanufactured, lowest-commondenominator pap, but it also leads to the notion that all rootsy bar-band music is good by definition—and that’s really not a healthy alternative.

It results in cuts like “Get Rhythm,” another of the so-what covers they run through in their own arrangement that neither enhances nor detracts from Johnny Cash’s original or the numerous other versions since. It results in “My Girlfriend’s Pretty,” one of those neutered-jazz ballads NRBQ louses up each album

with. It results in “Smackaroo,” the hard-rock cut that opens the album (and that could be anybody were it not for Al Anderson’s grinding guitar) and in “Hit The Hay,” the hokey country spoof with which the set finally nods off at the end. And while “12 Bar Blues” might seem the kind of rockabillied blues right up their alley, this version is too coy to be effective.

Now, most of those songs aren’t but-and-out stinkers. They’re just the kind of everyday barroom fare that leads me to concludq NRBQ’s chief strength has been the\ability to be in the right place at the right time for so long. There are exceptions. The live version of “Daddy-’O’,” with its punch-drunk Tex-Mex flavorings courtesy the Whole Wheat Homs, is infectious and woozy, and suggests more depth than most of the studio cuts. And Terry Adams’s two British rips, “Rain At The Drive-In” (he likes it because he and his baby can make out unobserved) and “A Girl Like That” (she’s too big a slob for one so classy as his pal) are juvenile enough to pass for Nick Lowe, and point a possible direction these guys could take to reconcile their own roots with contemporary rock. Then bar-band aficionados like myself wouldn’t have to wonder: why NRBQ?

SUMMER WISHES, WINTER SCREAMS

KATE BUSH The Dreaming (EMI America)

by Richard C. Walla The Dreaming is, appropriately enough, a sleeper. British singer/songwriter Bush isn’t very well known in this country, except perhaps as the composer of “Wuthering Heights” which was covered by Pat Benatar on Crimes Of Passion. And even if you’re famikar with the album from which

that song comes from, The Kick Inside (recorded ’77)—a collection of almost conventional but well-crafted innocence-and-love songs, altemateJy precious and genuinely moving, with just enough looniness in Bush’s elfin (but powerful) soprano to make the more theatrical moments palatable—that still won’t prepare you for this one. Here she delves into all octaves, not just the castratiE.T. one, revealing a sultry middle range, a shout that could clear a room (earphones are recommended for initial listenings, but be prepared for a few jolts), an Exorcist growl, and other unclassifiable sounds. It’s a richly textured, eccentric work whose many aural pleasures more than make up for any lyric lapses.

E.g., “Sat In Your Lap,” which kicks off the album with hard driving, vaguely African percussion, layers of background vocals and trumpets interwoven, is about the age-old desire for knowledge and the equally ageold unwillingness to work for it. Ob-

viously, this could be pompous and preachy, but the accomplishment of the song (and the album) is to make oblique bromides catchy and slightly worn abstractions sound urgent. With a consistently surprising rhythmic and sonic overlay which is, if not tongue-in-cheek, then wonderfully off the wall, Bush can, at the most potentially pretentious lyric moment, make you laugh with delight (or at least smile...would you believe inwardly?). Conversely, some of the effects are chilling—“Pull Out The Pin” is an attempt to evoke jungle (i.e. Viet Nam) warfare from the “enemy” ’s point of view and has a truly haunting chorus, “just one thing in it/me and him/and I love life,” with that last line delivered in a hoarse screech that can make your skin crawl (no sappy singer/ songwriter smooth-out here, this is humanism with teeth) if it isn’t already crawling from the song’s suitably.pained music: atonal guitar, Asian percussion, menacing chopper

sound effects. Equally chilling are the closers on each side, brutally rapid descents into surrealism, better heard than described...A combination of cold horrors and zingy wit are offered on the title cut, a ditty about the despoiling of Australia (“ ‘Bang’ goes another Kanga/On the bonnet of a van”) which features Rolf “Tie Me Kangaroo Down” Harris on degeridu plus voice filters, animal noises, the by-now expected unexpected arrangemental flourishes, and a hopping melody at least as infectious as anything Total Coelo might come up with...

So seekers, this is a good one; not exactly rock ’n’ roll but then, nowadays, what is? And though we here at the Critics’ Home realize that you get tired of being urged to tread down some of these more obscure alleys we point out to you, trust me on this one, the trip is worth taking, it’s an eerie and amusing and memorable record (I think he likes it...).

John Morthland

GREG HAWKES Niagara Falla (Passport)

Quickly now. What are the operative terms most often used to define the sound of those new wave popsters, the Cars? Give up? How ’bout cold and cute? The Cars are, first and foremost, craftsmen;Nthere’s no room for freelancing or superfluous emotions in their music. Hooks take precedence over soloing, even if Elliot Easton does get to tear off a flash break every now and then, and sweating is definitely a no-no. Theirs is a fuel-efficient, streamlined sound; (as we take the liberty of mixing our metaphors freely here) and if like American motel rooms and super-highways, they offer little in the way of variation or unfamiliar sights, at least there’s always a clean change of sheets and a sense of knowing where you’re going.

Having passed the multi-platinum plateau (and seen their best album, Panorama, roasted alive by critics looking for pop stability rather than innovation), the Cars have gone about on their own to explore those solo projects that do not fit within the strictures of THE BAND ITSELF. So slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch, to scrutinize Greg Hawkes’ first solo outing, Niagara Falls, which features an oriental-flavored synthpop/rhythm machine brand of music that owes its success (and lack thereof) to the Cars keyboardist’s unadorned, direct style of rhythm and texture. Hawkes is not of the grandiloquent school of synthesists, who view electronic keyboards as jive mini-orchestras; as his pungent, pithy asides on Cars records indicate, Hawkes is of the Kraftwerk, computer-readout camp. Out of the seeming inhumanity of digitized blipbleep, he fantasizes a new wave dance floor-jungle of colorful textures, mechanized rhythms and video arcade melodies.

Niagara Falls comes and goes like computerized haiku, offering bright,

chirpy impressions of human beings imitating machines, and what friendly little buggers they are. Hawkes goes for a very vowel-like vocabulary on his synthesizers, all bell-tones, Calder mobiles, clarinets and children’s voices (although, on “Jet Lag” and “Voyage into Space,” he does a pretty fair country imitation of Easton’s scorcho guitar distortion). And oftentimes he sets them up in relationship to the rhythm boxes (calling local 802, calling local 802), so that the downbeats and seem to be turning around—when, in fact, they’re perfectly static. This works to good effect on “Let There Be Lights” and the title track where subterranean synth-bass patterns and Linn Drum backbeats provide a hypnotic core of being for a ^frosty accumulation of aural sushi.

Unfortunately, though none of the compositions are turgid or offensive, there’s not much meat on the skeleton and an hour later you’re hungry again. Also, unlike real live drummers, rhythm machines don’t breathe, so where tunes like “Llamas” and “The Missing Link” contain delightfully delicate swatches, the melodic stasis can get oppressive after a while. Still, this is Hawkes’ first go round, and perhaps all that is really missing is a floor full of dancers or a simultaneous video to complete the total picture.

Chip Stern

MARI WILSON Show People (London)

Mari Wilson is some kinda character. She proudly displays a massive beehive hairdo that’s kept in place by the folks at ChemLawn. In fact, it’s constructed like the terraced pyramids the ancient Aztecs and Mayans used to whip up. Now, if

she’d only cover “When A Mayan Loves A Woman.”

She may not exactly be strap-onand-bone-down material, but her vocals definitely wet my whistle. She has one of those sorta low, sorta cool voices that sneak up on you like the growing menace of odometer tampering. Since I’m the sort of guy who often wakes up with a Garden Weasel next to me in bed, I can truly appreciate her breakdown Buf Puf capabilities.

After The Throat, Mari’s biggest asset is the outstanding, ’60s Motown-ish material written especially for her by Teddy Johns. He’s a real low profile type of guy who, if he was an actor, would appear in the credits as Parking Lot Attendant or 3rd Officer.

Teddy baby is well studied in the creation of indecently catchy songs with the kind of hooks that nail you a little at a time. Not unlike bracket creep. The tunes may be slightly too reminiscent of each other in some instances, but they’ve been butting into my own personal life on a regular basis for weeks now. Like, I’ll be standing in line waiting to see the uncut

version of Chico, the Misunderstood Coyote, when—blammo—“Just What I Always Wanted” suddenly the bulldaggers of my soul. This sort of effect was fine with me until “The End Of The Affair” which, frankly, gives me the urge to tie a bandanna around my head and go give birth in a field somewhere.

Plus, there’s more hot cuts—the inescapable “Wonderful To Be With” and its cagey Four Tops/ Good, Bad & Ugly moves; the potent ballad fudgesicles of Bacharach-David’s “Are You There (With Another Girl)”; or “Ecstacy”., .hey—this is the real stuff! Only stinker is Mari’s thoroughly unconvincing version of “Cry Me A River.” Cry me a pond, maybe. A rivulet. A fiord, even.

Great singer, great songs, strong arrangements, solid production, neat hair—what more could you ask for? The only thing better than this record would be if life had a drive-thru lane.

Rick Johnson

IAN HUNTER All The Good Once Are Taken (Columbia)

If John Cougar is the Common Man, motorhead drop-out division, then Ian Hunter is the Common Man, English Lit degree division. It’s been obvious over the years that part of him is a mug-hoisting, shitsloshing, girl-guzzling kinda guy who works for a living, hates to read, and finds himself in a sinkhole of sentiment when love goes awry. But after Hunter gets puke drunk, a keen spiritual and artistic intelligence keeps him awake and keeping notes through the many hangovers and ’ aftermaths. To assess his music from only one side or the other is pretty fruitless; matter of fact, it seems hard for both motorheads and lit/students to figure the guy. Has been since the Mott days, which could explain Hunter’s bothersome stall in the land of the minor legend.

This LP, for instance, has 6 songs out of 9 shackled to the signature Hunter 10-ton backbeat. At first few listens, telling tales like “Every Step Of The Way,” “Fun,” “Something’s Going On,” and “Captain Void” come off as low-evolution tribal stomps. Which would be okay if they really were tribal stomps, but each time Hunter’s smarts ooze through and sticky up all the jollyness. Even motorheads can see it through the cracks of the crunch.

You get the feeling that Hunter has lived too long in the jaws of his own identity crisis. (He’s not a Graham Parker, nor is he a Def Leppard... hmm.) And, when it doesn’t bother him, Hunter can really make some meaty music. I.e., the middle eight bars of “Fun,” wherein Hunter makes head-hanging apologies to the woman he’s wronged and recites the litany of correct behavior. “The only problem is,” he goes on as the music counts down to blast-off, “I WANNA PARTY!!!” What’s a gal to do in the face of such joyous betrayal?

Actually, this album does have a somewhat academic sort of Structure; it opens and closes with the same song done in two pointedly different moods. Lucky for us, “All Of The Good Ones Are Taken” is a primo Hunter bout of resignation and longing. The opening reading is au courant radio pop, mid-tempo and chipper; the second is very lOcc (and it works): If you majored in anything like English Lit, you find yourself listening to the rest of the tunes (a couple more OK love songs, a couple of good state-of-the-world songs) wondering where the connective tissue is. Because of its native reticence, All Of The Good Ones Are Taken will not reveal said tissue (or lack thereof) until later. At which point most of these songs will be a lot of fun to listen to and you won’t care. Just like any good motorhead should.

A word on the arrangements and production. Hunter has never been an originator in either category; watch out for the “syn-pop” here. Some people will probably think of All Of as a showcase for a puffy old sot with a synthesizer. Thank GOD!, I say. Pretty soon bleeps and dips won’t have any power of artistic inference in and of themselves. Then all those young boys with paralyzed faces and abstract art haircuts will be seen as the common men they are.

Without lit degr~'es. If you gonna give `em ignorance, give `em John Cougar. Or, at moments, Ian Hunter. "

Laura Fissinger

NONA HENDRYX Nona (RCA)

You know Nona. Along with Patti LaBelle and Sarah Dash, she was part 6f LaBelle. A few years ago, if I told you an ex-member of LaBelle had made a solo record and it was pretty good, you probably would’ve sneered, “Disco sucks!” or “Didn’t they used to wear those tin foil space suits?” or “Didn’t they sing that one about going to bed together in French?” Well, yes. And yes again, B.P.M. breath. Nevertheless, despite Nona Hendryx’s recent resurrection as a “dance-oriented” artist, it’s un-

fair to pigeonhole either her or LaBelle. After all, Nona’s traveled a road steeped in roots: from church choir Jjospel through Spector era R&B, Motown soul, glitter funk and finally, noowave.

Past coupla years, she’s been working with bassist Bill Laswell and synthesizer player Michael Beinhom, the Brooklyn-based production/performance duo known as Material.

They had a club smash on Ze Records with “Bustin’ Out,” a song which should have caused Hendryx’s career to do just that. It was Nona’s “I Will Survive,” her “Bad Girls,” her “Pull Up To The Bumper,” as Material’s clickety-click Eurosound provided a riveting backdrop to the singer’s urgent call to arms, the coldhard steel instrumentation neatly contrasted against Hendryx’s red-hot vocal vulnerability. But the song simply did not become a pop hit.

Nona continues the balancing act between catharsis and restraint which marks her collaboration with Material. “B-Boys,” the lead track, crackles with the kind of electricity Donna Summer used t’communicate before she got religion, though its taunting lyrical substance has nothing to do with the “hip-hop” title. But Nona’s just getting started. She proceeds to lay her sexual cards on the table in “Living On The Border,” a slice of frank, personal philosophy which eschews cool style to rock out with a vengeance as it proudly cops to the tune of freedom of personal choice. And, if this particular confession leaves any doubt as to what that preference is, “Keep It Confidential” and the soaring “Design For Living” spell it out loud and clear. The surging vocal on the latter connects the ultra-femininity of Gloria Gaynor and Supremes-era Diana Ross to the toughness of post-modern ironists like Joan Armatrading, Grace Jones and Marianne Faithfull.

3 ALARM ROCK

ZZ Top Eliminator (Warner Brothers)

by J. Kordosh

I figured I’d call up Bob Seger to talk about this new ZZ album, since Bob’s about the most venerated American rocker of the last three centuries. Even though he’s been around about 287 more years than ZZ Top, they’ve been with us for over a decade now, so they’re getting semi-venerable in their own right. Let’s roll that tape.

MYSELF: Bob, this is J. Listen, this new Top LP sounds pretty good, eh? Sort of like they’re pretty comfortable putting out adult music. What a wild, true-to-life American band!

PHONE: I’m sorry, we have no fisting for a Mr. Bob Seger.

MYSELF: Yeah, I think sometimes that they’re the only band in the USA that actually understands music. Is that too nuts? And the great smut! “I Got The Six!” “Gimme your nine!” Get it? Six? Nine? You know, numbers. I’ll bet the lyrics on “Got Me Under Pressure” are a riot, too,

but I can’t make ’em all out. Did you catch that line about “She might get out a nightstick and hurt me real, real bad?” Ain’t it the truth? Boy, you can’t blame that on the moon, pal.

PHONE: Is that in the city of Ann Arbor?

MYSELF: And the ZZ funk-out on side two! Did you listen to that bass solo Dusty plays on “Thug?” Man,

there’s no ejcess in Tejas, that’s for sure. And Frank plays some mean skins there, too, especially for a guy who doesn’t even use a rhythm machine onstage.

PHONE: I’ll check Washtenaw County.

MYSELF: And, really, Bob, -I don’t want to say your own guitarist controversy was a tempest in a tamale, but what would you give for a Billy Gibbons?? Jesus, that little rhythm hack on “Gimme All Your Lovin’ ”! The scummy riffing on “TV Dinners”! Is this man the jen-yoo-ine Great American Picker or w'hat? And, y’know, I’ve heard that they didn’t even have...whatdayacallit? ...you know, a concept or a theme or whatever it' is an album’s gotta have. Just a regular real good album! Crazy, huh? Makes you wonder how they could go the distance in this wacky business.

RHONE: I’m sorry, sir, that number is unlisted.

MYSELF: Yeah, Bob, I kinda figured you’d feel the same way about an honest-to-God band that keeps churning out rock ’n’ roll like you used to. And, now that you mention it, I think they’ve had their beards longer than you’ve had yours, too. Well, keep listening to Eliminator and try,to stay in touch, will you? I really mean stay in touch, too, man.

PHONE: Click!