(I Love It When You) Call Me Names. Joan Armatrading. 1983. A&M.

 Sung by a “short, short man” to the “big woman” he’s sharing a love affair with, Joan Armatrading’s album opener from 1983 is passion set ablaze with its lyrical depiction of the fetishization of physical abuse, such that it tests the limits of contemporary convention. Today’s culture urges musical audiences to consider lyrical content from empathic perspectives that lean from critical appreciation towards emotional assessments antithetical to rock and roll era shibboleths, including the unruly subject of the full, robust spectrum of sexual desire. For (I Love It When You) Call Me Names, Armatrading crafted a traditional pop structure that shifts the listener’s emotional responses across its three compositional features. There are the grisly details of the affair that occupy the aggressive expository verses, the core elation that defines the relationship heard in the exultant chorus, and finally, the view of the couple’s dynamic seen from outside their lives together. The song challenges with an arch, commercial know-how the assumptions record listeners make about female vocalists, a song’s point of view, the depths of romantic and sexual love, our sensitivity and confusion about cultural terms of abuse and deviations from the norm. Steve Lillywhite frames this psychosexual drama as FM radio excitement, and it’s easy to lose yourself in the production of Armatrading’s master backing band: Adrian Belew, Daryl Stuermer, Tony Levin, Jerry Marrota, among others. Such high profile professionalism gives Armatrading’s work a carefully considered scope that upends our misgivings about mixing entertainment with issues of domestic violence, misgivings that aren’t so fully resolved by the song’s fade out. Like the undercurrent of eroticism that drives our nightmares, jukebox content is often the unsettling tonic we need to shock us into self awareness and recognition. Bring on the disturbances.

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