by Cathleen McGuigan; page 65

Forget the stereotype of the bubblehead pop princess, her vocabulary as skimpy as her stretch mini. Two of the fastest-rising divas on the pop charts are dead serious singer-songwriters without a trace of drop-dead glamour: Tracy Chapman and Natalie Merchant, both 24. Chapman's self-titled debut album, number 27 on the Billboard pop chart and climbing, has been heaped with praise. Merchant fronts the band 10,000 Maniacs, whose second major-label album, In My Tribe, has sold nearly 500,000 copies and propelled her into the spotlight.

What's all the fuss about? When Chapman takes the stage on tour, she is clearly a no-frills act. Jeans and a T shirt. Short dreadlocks. An acoustic guitar. But she mesmerizes her fans with the rich drama of her unadorned voice, singing a tale of obsessive love: "Everyday I'm psychoanalyzed/For my lover, for my lover/They dope me up and I tell them lies." Merchant onstage is a precocious child, dressed in a droopy frock, skipping and twirling as if lost in her own dream world. The oddball girlishness jars seductively with her throaty voice and such knowing songs as Don't Talk, a strangely lyrical admonition to a mean, drunk lover. Both Merchant and Chapman are kicking open the door that neofolkie waif Suzanne Vega cracked with Luka, last year's surprise hit song about a battered child. They tackle topics that are far from most Top 40 fare - illiteracy, poverty, wife-beating. "People of my generation grew up listening to pop," says Merchant. "I think they want something different." Their sound and the lyrics woven with rich images root them in the folk rock of the late '60s and early '70s.

At the time of Woodstock, of course, Merchant still had her baby teeth. But growing up in Jamestown, NY, she listened to her mother's records - the Beatles, the Byrds, and Peter, Paul and Mary. At 17 she joined 10,000 Maniacs, a local band that took its name from a horror movie. ("It's been extra work for us, not to be identified as a heavy-metal band," says Merchant.) She worked odd jobs, such as one at a hippie whole-grain bakery. "I was the granola girl," she says with a wry laugh. The group made two records on their own label before Elektra signed them in 1984. Besides Merchant, the band includes Robert Buck, Dennis Drew, Steven Gustafson and Jerome Augustyniak.

Gritty songs: Merchant often pulls ideas for lyrics (other band members compose much of the music) from the news. "I don't own a TV," she says, "but when I'm in a hotel, I watch CNN constantly - with the sound off." Recently she was struck by an image from footage age of the mining disaster in West Germany. As families gathered at the site, "one little boy started crying and beating his head against a car," she recalls. "You can't help but be affected by that."

Chapman, who was raised in a mostly black, working-class neighborhood in Cleveland, writes gritty songs about desperate dreamers - the girl in the haunting Fast Car, who's trying to conjure up a world beyond the homeless shelter, or the woman who muses about a "sweet lazy life," having Mountains o'Things. When she was a child, her mother always had music playing - Marvin Gaye, Mahalia Jackson. Through a program called A Better Chance, Chapman won a scholarship to a school in Danbury, Conn., where she felt encouraged to perform - the school's chaplain, whom she thanks on her album jacket, took up a collection to buy her a new guitar. Later, while studying at Tufts University near Boston, she began to play on the streets and in coffeehouses. A fellow student introduced her to his father, Charles Koppelman, a major music publisher, which led to a record contract, also with Elektra.