Pop Reviews: Getting the Message With Sights ‘n’ Sounds : Club MTV for Dance-Watchers Only

The Club MTV live revue at the Forum on Sunday was a concert posing as a TV show posing as a dance club. But in this club, you couldn’t so much dance as watch some people in flouncy Betsey Johnson minis dance for you on stage--half the exhilaration with none of the work. Actual MTV videos segued smoothly into the performances of MTV-familiar musicians--Milli Vanilli, Was (Not Was), Paula Abdul, Tone Loc--who reproduced their video hits accurately, especially if you kept one eye on the immense TV screen over the stage.

To underline the passivity of the experience, “Downtown” Julie Brown, who emcees the daily televised “Club MTV” show (sort of a late-’80s “American Bandstand”), introduced the acts and plugged a sponsoring soft drink in a trans-Caribbean whine--just as she does on MTV! But the crowd wasn’t issued remote controls, so we couldn’t zap her off for five minutes of Bullwinkle as we do with MTV.

Well, it felt something like a dance club anyway, with billows of smoke, flashing black lights, bass cranked up loud enough to powder granite. As in a dance club, people paid more attention to their hair than to the stage, at least during the high-energy meanderings of openers Information Society.

At their best, Was (Not Was)--two wisecracking white guys from Detroit who put together a first-class R&B; revue; a Lee Atwater fantasy made flesh--sounded as sweet and alive as primo Sam Cooke. Clubgoers could have been more impressed; Was (Not Was) probably wasn’t cute enough for ‘em.

German popsters Milli Vanilli were plenty cute enough, slender young black guys with cheekbones to here, and the little girls screamed every time Rob or Fab shook their long braids or wiggled their rumps.

They brought a 16-year-old girl out of the audience (later identified as Gloria Esquivias), sat her between them and cuddled her throughout a ballad; she cried like a bride. They gave each other running high-fives after songs as if they’ve just gotten away with something big. In a way they have. The two can’t sing a lick, and their vanilla dance grooves are about as funky as Mantovani.

Still, any guys who can grab their crotches as much as they do and still make junior-high girls swoon must be all right, even if only in a Bay City Rollers kind of way.

Though the Club MTV dancers weren’t all that deft--they seemed chosen more for girl-next-door wholesomeness than for any sort of terpsichorean skill--Paula Abdul is an astonishing dancer, executing steps the Kirov would trip on, while never missing a note. Madonna might be the only singer with more control of her body.

But in spite of Abdul’s magnificent pop choreography, her stage show was curiously flat, perhaps because the dancing’s too perfect, perhaps because her small, affectless voice doesn’t amount to much without studio tricks. She’d be great in the kind of Las Vegas show where the biggest fun is guessing what outfit Cher’s going to wear for the next number.

Not long ago, Tone Loc rapped in actual dance clubs (his producer, Matt Dike, is L.A.’s top dance club deejay). In only a few months, the good-natured rapper seems have made the transition to headlining a sold-out Forum with astonishing ease. The beats, kind of distorted with the other Club MTV performers, sounded richer and funkier played really loud , as if they were supposed to be that way.

He shook hands with the audience, bantered with the audience--acknowledged that there is an audience, which is probably contrary to the Club MTV house policy, but what the hey--and makes rap cliches convincing for the first time since 1982. And that voice--whiskey-warm, rasping, insinuating, funny--is the best instrument in rap, cutting effortlessly through cranked guitar chords and bongo beats and cowbells.

In the parking lot after the show, Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina” was blasted out of more car tape decks than all other songs combined. That’s probably because the Milli Vanilli fans were being picked up by their parents.