by: John Leland

A month after declaring that 10,000 Maniacs will never again perform Cat Stevens's Peace Train, because Stevens supported the death threats against Salman Rushdie, singer Natalie Merchant is regaling me with an unprovoked diatribe against Madonna's Like a Prayer video. It is just noon in the New York City offices of her record company, where she has come to promote 10,000 Maniacs' vitriolic new album, Blind Man's Zoo, and she is in full swing, speaking with quiet emphasis in an accent that sounds almost Scottish. For a twenty-five-year-old from a small factory town in northwestern New York, she sure can blow. She removes her heavy-framed glasses and straightens the collar of her simple cotton print dress; she is not wearing makeup. When she was younger, she went around telling people that she would commit suicide when she reached twenty-five. Last year she announced that she cared more about nuclear arms depots than about boys. But this morning, for some reason, she is obsessed with Madonna's burning crosses. It has been a long rant, full of history and propaganda, until finally she pulls up, saying, "I think everybody who's in the public eye should be conscious of being a role model. I am. You should be conscious of it, of everything you do or say. It's a responsibility." She pauses. "Is that the end of the interview?" She has yet to answer a question.

Part pill, part inspiration, Natalie Merchant is an engaging contradiction: a high school dropout with a laundry list of pretensions and the inarguable power of her convictions. It's hard to decide whether to tell her to lighten up or offer to sign her petition. But one thing is clear: in the eight years since they formed at the community college radio station in Jamestown, New York, 10,000 Maniacs have grown into one of the most forceful and innovative young bands in America.

Blind Man's Zoo, their best record to date, is as severe and as brusquely charming as Merchant's monologues. Over often beautiful, folky accompaniment, she attacks lofty themes: unwanted pregnancy, Vietnam, pollution, the enslavement of colonial Africa, fire and brimstone. But more than ever before, the music also rages. Combining the artsy mysticism of R.E.M. and the frank social consciousness of Tracy Chapman, 10,000 Maniacs have become the populist radicals they set out to be. "I don't consider us a rock band, because I never was interested in rock," she says. "The only stigma attached to saying we're folk musicians is that people think of coffeebouses and mandolins, dulcimers, 1962. Folk music changes like anything else. Since we wrote our first song, I've been singing about things that concern people either on a universal or personal scale." She stops, smiles, and launches into a monologue about the destruction of the great herds of elephants. It is utterly self-righteous and utterly compelling, a combination of bile and pristine eloquence. Just like 10,000 Maniacs.