YOU KNOW HOW sometimes you hear a song on the radio, while you're pulling out of a big-box store parking lot, without any fun-filled big boxes but instead with boring essentials like mouthwash, Little Debbie snack cakes, and Depends, and you're feeling like a shopping zombie, and 107.7 the Bone is cranked because you were listening to "Kashmir" at the proper stadium-worthy level to get in the "mood" for Robert Plant at the Paramount July 19? That certain number comes blaring out of the speakers, and everything suddenly looks way 1983 once more.

It was '83 when Joan Jett first soothed the ruffled feathers of the poor dove she was dragging into a filthy-fun ménage à trois in "The French Song," and damn if it didn't feel that way again when I heard it recently, played in anticipation of Bastille Day on Little Steven's syndicated Underground Garage show.

Who is this? I wondered. It was too pop to be Girlschool, too rude to be Heart, too punk to be the Breeders. The song just goes on and on, hammering home the French-language chorus as relentlessly as Jett courts her male or female cherry bomb, with what seems like about a dozen guitar breaks. "J'aime faire l'amour sur tout à trois," Jett browbeats her ménage, though judging from the way the band plays off each other, I suspect she's really bellowing at the three other Blackhearts. That's amore! "I know what I am, I am what I am," she chants toward the close, before jamming in that last rhyme with the blunt force of Mariska Hargitay knocking down the door of a sex offender. "Don't think that I'm uncouth, I only speak the truth."

Cloddish, but so excellent and a "gem," as Little Steven put it later, after following the track with the equally ass-kicking "Talk Talk," by Music Machine, and "Rock 'n' Roll Napalm," by the Resistoleros. They're not all from '83, but the three seemed like miraculous, mean little irresistible blasts through the fog, propelled by the power of refusal.

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