JAGGED LITTLE PILLBOX.

Singer-songerwriter Susan Hyatt attacks sexual hypocrisy from all sides

"I'm a very direct kind of girl," says singer-songwriter Susan Hyatt, front woman for the punk-pop band Pillbox, with a laugh. The outspoken, Seattle-born Hyatt, who says she's "bisexual and proud," has been making a lot of noise in her adopted home of London for the past five years. Both onstage and in the British press, Hyatt has earned a reputation for sounding off against the music establishment as well as society's prejudices. She has now set her uncompromising sights on the United States with Pillbox's debut, Gimme What I Want.

"It's all about freedom," Hyatt says of Gimme's message. Wielding a voice that's been compared to Chrissie Hynde's and a guitar that rocks like Joan Jett's, Hyatt riffs through the CD's 15 tracks, tackling sexual politics with the kind of brutal honesty and NC-17 lyrics that would make hip-hop bad girl Lil' Kim blush. But Hyatt, who insists she moved to the United Kingdom to escape the "selective morality based on fear and stupidity" she experienced in the United States, is not just looking to shock. She's determined to bring her message of liberation to the masses, and she knows of what she sings--a printout of her life's experiences would be equal parts Richter scale and Kinsey scale.

Sample the lyric "What really turns you on? / Just cuz you flick me, doesn't mean a thing" from "Invasion": The song was written to Hyatt's real-life male lover at the time, who eventually acknowledged, with her support, that he was gay.

Because of that experience Hyatt also began to mm the mirror back on herself. "I started questioning my own sexuality, and that's why my CD makes me sound like such a sex addict!" she says, laughing. "I started thinking about all the men I had crushes on in my teen years, and they were mostly drag [queens]."

Hyatt soon realized her attraction to the female form wasn't limited to men dressed in women's clothing. "Since my last boyfriend looked like a carbon copy of a young Kim Basinger, I decided to go for the real thing," she recalls.

If Hyatt's CD is helped lyrically by her cast of former and future lovers, it also benefits musically from her equally colorful professional past. In addition to logging time as guitarist with the all-girl pop garage group the Pandoras, Hyatt spun her cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" into a club hit in 1993. Her sassy delivery will soon be getting club play again, as Alexis Smith's remix of the Pillbox cut "Me & My Rhythmbox" is about to come out.

With a tour in the works and the release of Gimme What I Want, Hyatt hasn't had much time for real-life romance with either sex. Asked to name her dream date, she famously told the British press she'd pick Wonder Woman. "She's beautiful, powerful, and well-equipped--with the truth lasso!" Hyatt says.

Still, the rising star hasn't ruled out the possibility of finding a heroine to call her own. "If I want you," Hyatt says with her characteristic self-assurance, "I'll let you know."

Gdula is a freelance writer who has written for The Washington Post.