Janis Ian is for the trendies one of the most exciting, red-hot writer/performers in pop at the moment; for the rest of us she's definitely here to stay. With "Miracle Row,"… she has seized for herself the title of Girl Most Likely to Get Pop off Its Moribund Ass in the Late Seventies.

Like the lady herself, "Miracle Row" exudes theatricality. It has equal amounts of the high romance of the low life and the jaded, dark-red-nail-polish lows that accompany the high life. Ian's theatricality, like that of another Great Proletarian, Bertolt Brecht, may not be immediately discernible, but it is there. She, too, chooses street argot as her lyric form, and the non-chalant gut punch seems to be her favorite device. But she is more than an artistic descendant of Brecht in her sardonic, toughly humorous acceptance of an existential world in which the cunning, the...