$TARSHIP’$ VI$ION : CHECK LIST: **** Great Balls of Fire, *** Good Vibrations, ** Maybe Baby, * Running on Empty

*”NO PROTECTION.” Starship. RCA. In a recent interview, singer-songwriter Graham Parker characterized Starship’s music as “a fairly awful heavy-metal cabaret thing.” If, for some reason, Parker found himself listening to “No Protection,” he might decide that assessment had been too kind.

This album extends the tradition of 1985’s Top 10 LP “Knee Deep in the Hoopla,” which unleashed two No. 1 singles, “We Built This City” and “Sara.” It also reveals advanced symptoms of a malady that’s afflicted the Bay Area band in recent years: Its artistic vision has been increasingly impaired by the dollar signs in its eyes.

This is reflected in the shameless manner Starship pushes all the right commercial buttons, leaving nothing to chance. The button-pushing begins with including a song that already reached No. 1, the prophetically titled “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” And it continues with jamming the record full of similarly soggy successors--led by current contender “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over).”

Three separate producers and 19(!) songwriters are represented on the album’s 10 tracks. The music itself is big, though “big” here means bloated. Heavy on ballads and mid-tempo snoozers, much of this offensively inoffensive material is pumped full of gleaming keyboard fills and other sonic sweeteners. As some of the song titles suggest, this music is married to lyrics that rarely get past bumper-sticker sentiments or puffy platitudes.

Occasionally, the album veers into something resembling rock ‘n’ roll, like Craig Chaquico’s crunchy guitar leads on the upbeat “Girls Like You” or Grace Slick’s impassioned belting on a fistful of numbers. When Slick really shines, it’s not that difficult to picture her providing the fiery vocals 20 years ago when the Jefferson Airplane was soaring with “Somebody to Love.”

No, what’s really hard is accepting the notion that Starship is actually a descendant of the Jefferson Airplane. Now it seems more like something along the lines of a funny uncle.