Consumer Guide Album

Joan Armatrading: Me Myself I [A&M, 1980]
The perennially unclassifiable London West Indian meets Instant Records' Richard Gottehrer for her punchiest and most attractive album--she even comes close to laughing a couple of times. The title tune is to narcissism as "Brown Sugar" is to racism--she doesn't prettify it, but she doesn't forswear its pleasures, either. Suggesting to this white male heterosexual that unclassifiable may be a polite way to say unreachable--and that unreachable may be why even songs as well-realized as these wouldn't take that extra pop leap if Gottehrer weren't motorvating them. B+