POP WEEKEND : The 2 Live Crew: Banal, Witless Raunch

Mix a little raunch with a bit of wit, as everybody from Cole Porter to Prince has done at some point, and you’ve got a formula for pop that’s lively, and maybe even healthily, artfully shocking.

Take away the wit, and turn the raunch into drooling pornography, and you’ve got the formula for the banal, embarrassing exercise that The 2 Live Crew perpetrated Saturday night at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim. Imagine a bunch of smirking, priapic frat boys throwing a party where the entertainment is grainy stag films and the brainless bump and grind of nearly naked female hirelings. There you have it, except that this Miami-based crew substituted its own cesspool rhymes for the nudie movies.

Some in the half-filled house stood with their arms folded, perhaps wondering whether they should feel a little ashamed, while others slurped it up like hooting refugees from Morton Downey Jr.’s studio audience.

The slimiest moves in this 45-minute excrescence were the transformation of Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night” into dirty doggerel sing-alongs. The 2 Live Crew also treated its crowd to a heaping side order of homophobia. And yes, it’s always edifying to hear women repeatedly referred to by that dehumanizing word, “bitch.”

Crew leader Luther Campbell is nicknamed Luke Skyywalker, but Larry Flyynt would be more appropriate. Like the Hustler magazine porn baron, Campbell knows that there is big money in pandering to the baser instincts. The Two Live Crew’s first two albums went gold, and the current one, “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” is in the Top 40.

The less said about this tax on the First Amendment, the better. Lenny Bruce died for somebody’s sins, but not these.

Second-billed EPMD (Erick and Parrish Making Dollars) is one of rap’s biggest dollar-makers right now with a No. 1 album on the black music chart, but its ill-planned 30-minute set had no form or momentum, and it was further hampered by the rappers’ poor diction. The group managed flickers of interest--most of them having to do with a duo of hot hip-hop dancers who accompanied the stocky New York rappers, Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith.

Breeze, a new rap singer from Los Angeles, didn’t offer anything fresh in a tepidly received set. Enjoyable dance routines were the highlights of brief appearances by a couple of unheralded Los Angeles acts, Throw Down Twins and Superb & the Tribe.