POP MUSIC : Independent Vision From Hitchcock and Chapman

Tracy Chapman and Robyn Hitchcock don’t seem on first encounter to be pop artists with much in common.

Chapman, 24, is a Boston-based singer-songwriter whose topical urban-folk tales reflect with uncompromising intensity on society’s victims--the battered woman, families trapped in the poverty cycle, a child terrorized by racism, an inner-city woman held captive by romantic self-delusion. Chapman’s debut album has just been released by Elektra.

Hitchcock, 36, is an Englishman whose melodic, ‘60s-accented rock is wonderfully appealing in a familiar, reassuring way, but whose themes over the years have often touched on matters of unsettling isolation and oblique flights of imagination. Hitchcock has been making albums since the late ‘70s, but his new “Globe of Frogs” is the first on a major U.S. label (A&M;).

The element Chapman and Hitchcock share is independent vision--the rarest, yet most valuable quality in pop music.

Independent vision was once so common in rock that everyone took it for granted. Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis were such originals that their individuality (or independent vision) was accepted as part of what rock ‘n’ roll was. The same was true of the great artists of the ‘60s--the Beatles and Rolling Stones through Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.

One reason the ‘70s were considered such a pop wasteland was that conformity rather than change became the cornerstone of the music.

Most pop music simply filters through the multibillion-dollar radio and retail pipeline, providing little more than background diversion before passing on to the classic rock or oldies stations. The music doesn’t try to provoke or inspire, but simply to entertain on the most superficial level.

Though there are dozens of noteworthy artists with personal vision tucked away in the wings of the record business, most never make it past the cult/small label circuit. Thanks to their rewarding new albums, Chapman and Hitchcock have a chance to move beyond that circuit.

Yes, Chapman is surprised that her debut album (“Tracy Chapman”) is getting the kind of rave reviews (in New York Times, Village Voice and elsewhere) that probably even eluded first-time LPs by Joan Armatrading and Joni Mitchell, the artists to whom she has been most frequently compared.

And yes, she’s surprised that a high-powered manager like Elliot Roberts (who has represented such artists as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan) would want to sign her.

But Chapman says her biggest surprise was that her highly personalized brand of urban folk was accepted by a major record company in the first place.

Playing clubs and coffee houses two years ago while still a student at Tufts University, the Cleveland native figured her only chance at a record deal was a small, independent label--the kind that champion artists with a specialized style.

“Music was never just a hobby for me,” she said during a recent interview in Roberts’ office in West Hollywood. “I’d pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.

“One reason it didn’t sound like most of the things you hear on the radio is I didn’t listen a lot to the radio. I tended to be more isolated. It wasn’t what I heard on the radio or what major companies were tending to put out, so I didn’t think they would feel what I was doing was marketable.”

Chapman--who was raised by her mother in a black working-class area of Cleveland--came to the attention of Elektra through New York music titan Charles Koppelman, father of a classmate at Tufts.

Many of her themes--which revolve around the struggle for self-reliance--seem tied to images from her childhood.

The songs that best summarize her approach are the attractively arranged “Fast Car,” which is receiving an encouraging amount of airplay from rock-oriented radio stations, and the starker “Across the Lines,” an autobiographical account of an incident during childhood that reportedly led to a minor racial riot in Cleveland.

“Fast Car” is more social observation than autobiography. It’s the story of a young woman who breaks away from unreasonable obligations at home only to end up in an even more damaging relationship and having to again struggle to break free.

“You got a fast car / I want a ticket anywhere,” the woman says in the song’s opening line. Soon, we learn that she has quit school to work in a convenience store to help support her alcoholic father. But she dreams of her own life and fantasizes about escaping with a man who passes through her life in his fast car.

She joins his world, where once again she works to support a man--until he gets a job and they can move out of the shelter. Finally, she realizes, things aren’t getting any better. He has no interest in finding a job and she is still trapped. She finally tells him in a liberating break, “I got no plans, I ain’t going nowhere / So take your fast car and keep on driving.”

Feminism is a word that invariably pops up when female songwriters assert a strong point of view, and Chapman said she has seen the word applied to her work.

“I think that term has come to mean a lot of different things over the years,” she said. “It’s up to everyone to define it for themselves now. For me, the music comes down to a more human thing . . . that everyone should have the right to self determination, regardless of sex or race or those things. That’s the thread that connects the songs.”

You don’t even have to play the Hitchcock album to recognize you’re not dealing with your usual pop attraction. There’s an essay on the back of the new “Globe of Frogs” album jacket that defines his artistic independence and intent.

Titled “Manifesto,” it states in part: “This album does not deal with the conventional problems of so-called ‘real’ life: Relationships, injustice, politics and central heating systems, about which it’s notoriously hard to talk because orthodox lines of cliches have been devised for and against everything.”

Counting his days in the late ‘70s as a member of the Soft Boys band, Hitchcock has made 11 albums, including the new one. His music is especially inviting: Compact, flavorful rock ‘n’ roll with a great sense of ‘50s and ‘60s dynamics and charm. There are moments in the new album that bounce along with a rockabilly revivalism reminiscent of Dave Edmunds and Rockpile, and others that vibrate with the folk-minded guitar jangle of the Byrds. Mostly, however, the model is mid-period Beatles.

Lyrically, though, Hitchcock frequently moves in strange territory. His albums are filled with enough bizarre flights of fancy that such playful puns as “Robyn in Wonderland” have been applied to his work.

Individual songs are as likely to speak about creatures of nature (fish seem a special favorite this time) as the boy or girl next door, and it’s not usual for him to explore such matters as a man who is torn between his wife and the ghost of his previous wife.

It’s as if Hitchcock is saying, in serving up these unusual approaches to pop songs, that we tend to look at the world too narrowly. He probes at our consciousness to see if we can look more closely around us, and inside ourselves. In doing so, he combines some of the revelation and provocative wordplay associated with such diverse influences as Dylan, John Lennon, Syd Barrett and Elvis Costello.

Among the most appealing tracks: “Flesh Number One,” a surprisingly straightforward expression of the way people react to news of another man’s tragedy, and “Balloon Man,” one of the catchiest pop oddities since Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow.”

It’s unlikely after all these years that Hitchcock will lead a revolution in pop, but the new album is his cheeriest and most commercially promising collection. It has even made the Billboard magazine sales chart, albeit it at a lowly No. 113.

These songwriters seek to provoke and inspire,

not just serve up background diversion.