POP MUSIC REVIEW : Rapping Into Spotlight at Last for Young MC

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, Los Angeles rapper Young MC (nee Marvin Young) always seems to be in the wrong place at the right time. Or the right place at the wrong time. Or something.

At the age when many rappers were busy acquiring the colorful police records they would later disavow in interviews, Young

was an honors student (he is still clean cut in an age of gangster chic, his rhymes too clever by half).

When Los Angeles rap was just starting to break big last year, Young told British music journals that he was moving back to New York. His album, originally scheduled as the first LP from Delicious Vinyl, was pushed back six months when the monster success of Tone-Loc’s “Wild Thing” single--for which Young wrote half the words--caused Tone’s album to be rushed into print instead. (This week Young has a Top 10 single and a Top 20 album of his own, but in the media he is still “Young ‘Wild Thing’ MC.”)

After a million gigs opening for everybody from Tone-Loc to Public Enemy, Young MC finally has landed a tour opening but kind of as a co-star--for Boogie Down Productions, KRS-One’s street-savvy hip-hop posse that philosophizes about everything from condoms to biblical history to the CIA.

Young raps in a clear, smooth tenor; he enunciates complex rhymes cleanly as a scat singer. Where many rappers these days are content to hunch forward and let their dancers put on the show, Young’s swinging performance is closer to Smokey Robinson’s than to Kool Moe Dee’s--he knows he is an entertainer, not a guy at a poetry reading.

Anyway, Friday night, the Boogie Down/Young tour stopped at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim. Wrong place. The Celebrity can be a brutal venue: No rapper, not even Public Enemy or N.W.A, has ever survived the harsh sound system or the rotating stage. And, the crowd was clearly KRS-One’s, there to be enlightened more than entertained.

KRS-One, though politically progressive, has never been the subtlest of performers live; at times it seems he is bellowing along with his records like a drunk at a frat party, while an on-stage cameraman dogs his every move.

He dresses his rapper wife, Ms. Melodie, in sequins, and tosses records into the audience to keep its interest during her solo number. (His sister-in-law Harmony croons, um, harmony where other posses use old Lyn Collins samples.) By the seventh or eighth time he has shouted the old formula, “Throw your hands in the air/And wave them like you just don’t care,” you might be of a mind to disregard the moral of his hit “Stop the Violence” and rush the stage with malice aforethought.

But Boogie Down Productions’ spare, bouncy beats, almost as sprightly as aerobics-studio funk with a harder edge, are among the most danceable in hip-hop; the anti-violence rhymes, while simplistic, are sincere.

KRS-One comes across as a likable B-boy everyman, albeit one with a subscription to the New York Times, more concerned with setting a positive example than with earning a gold record (though he has two). He might be an old person’s idea of what a young person should be, but at least his heart is in the right place.