POP CAPSULES : ‘REGGAE SUNSPLASH ‘87’ AT THE GREEK

Reggae music has its eye on the mainstream. That’s the way it seemed at Sunday afternoon’s “Reggae Sunsplash ‘87” concert at the Greek Theatre, where dreadlocked emcee Tommy Cowan announced that Ras Tafari--the deified emperor Haile Selassie, that is--congratulates Los Angeles on the Lakers’ victory.

The show was sold out, demonstrating that reggae’s following remains substantial and devoted. The program offered a suitably broad cross section of styles, but the celebration was more of reggae as a musical entity than of the specific artists.

Headliner Freddie McGregor, a consistent Jamaican hitmaker, offered the kind of meticulously crafted, polished revue you expect from a slick American R&B; star. McGregor’s soft, crooning vocals and dread-next-door persona stirred the crowd on a closing medley of hits in the bouncy “rub-a-dub” style. Still, his set rarely was compelling.

Chalice’s set showed that the syndrome of technical proficiency and empty flash (“How ya doin’, L.A.?”) has penetrated Jamaican music. Apart from a too-brief snatch of doo-wop, the sextet has apparently devoted more time to perfecting its stage moves than concocting strong material.

Mutabaruka cut closest to reggae’s spiritual rebel-music core with his flowing prophet’s robes and his militant condemnations of cocaine, apartheid and Soviet-American domination of world affairs. But the lukewarm audience response after Mutabaruka left the stage suggested that the crowd was more interested in partying than politics.

In fact, only twice during the 3 1/2-hour show did the musical tempo slow dramatically--when Mutabaruka dropped a snippet of Bob Marley’s “Them Belly Full” into a poem, and when Chalice performed a version of Marley’s “Three O’Clock Roadblock (Rebel Music)”. Today’s hyped-up grooves may be more palatable to the international reggae audience, but the music has lost much of its old hypnotic resonance in the process.