Why Rap Doesn’t Cut It <i> LIVE</i>

There may be nothing at this moment in pop music more exhilarating than a great new rap record--the street-smart immediacy, the juxtaposition of beat and funky-fresh politics. Even if you don’t like the stuff, you can sense that it matters .

Nineteen-year-olds like De La Soul regularly come out of nowhere with mature, accessible, fully realized albums that radically shift the nature of the medium. Pundits and clergymen spend more time parsing the lyrics of certain rap songs than they do recent abortion decisions.Rap has been praised as a voice for the voiceless, an important mass medium for the underclass.

So why is rap so dull on stage?

When a new hard-rock band plays its very first support gig for, say, Whitesnake, it knows where to stand, what guitar licks work best, how the bass player should look when he bumps up against the guitarist.

Its album may be--probably will be -- truly banal, indistinguishable right down to the cover from Skid Row’s latest or a copy of Golden Earring’s greatest hits; but on stage, the group looks and sounds like what it is: a competent, professional arena band.

All the years of rehearsal and recording lead up to the moment when the singer can finally ask a Palace crowd, “Los Angeles, are you ready to rock?” And the crowd, insofar as it likes that stuff, is entertained.

But the simultaneous rise of record-company demand for new rappers and the national shortage of clubs willing to let new rappers play has all but ensured that rap remain almost exclusively a recorded medium.

Young bands, while baby geniuses in the studio, are often in the position of going out on the road with a gold album but almost no live experience. Hard-core rappers with gold albums and plenty of live experience are often wretched on stage. Certain splendid rap entertainers --Doug E. Fresh, for one--are fairly obscure. Where a rocker lives or dies by what he does on stage, a rapper rarely does.

Been to a rap show lately?

Here’s what you might find: Two guys in sweats and Afrika medallions shamble onto the stage at the Palace, slump and mumble into their microphones over beats over-amplified to the point of being indiscernible.

It takes nearly three full songs before you realize that this is the brilliant young act you came to see, not the no-name openers. The group’s debut LP has been universally praised as subtle and complex, but you’d never know it from their concert.

On a different night, perhaps a certain famous political rapper is on the bill, bellowing along with his hits like a pledge at a frat party.

Or:

* The multi-platinum hard-core rapper who’s structured his show like a second-rate Las Vegas revue.

* The pioneer gangster rapper who attempts to enliven his audience by shouting, “All the people with AIDS keep quiiii- et.”

* The rapper who brings dozens of his friends on stage, then can’t seem to find his microphone.

* The many, many rappers who perform perfunctory medleys, as if one half-hearted chorus from each of their popular songs is all the audience wants to hear.

Out of the 50 or so major rap shows in the Los Angeles area over the last several years, perhaps half a dozen have been engaging on any level at all.

N.W.A was dull. Eric B & Rakim were dull. Young M.C. was dull. M.C. Hammer was dull. Even Public Enemy has been dull.

Consider the basic nature of live rap: a guy on stage talking over recorded music, as exciting as “Sing Along With Mitch.” The format allows little room for spontaneity--the rappers considered “good live acts” are those who sound the most like their records.

Since almost all of the backing tracks you hear in concert are their records, the show adds little or nothing to the experience of the music. (Today’s complicated hip-hop mixes, sometimes featuring samples from dozens of records per song, would be impossible for an octopus to replicate live.)

The craft of rap these days is the recording studio, and in the history of the genre, no one has defined the state of the art of rap performance the way Mick Jagger did for rock or James Brown did for R&B.;

Rap was a strictly live medium when it began about 15 years ago in Bronx discos, four years before the first rap record was released. The essence of “hip-hop” (an umbrella term that includes both rap and the culture associated with rap) was the larcenous borrowing of music from a number of different sources, to be recombined into something totally new.

The heroes of first-generation rap were the deejays who made the new sound--Grandmaster Flash, D.J. Kool Herc, Afrika (“Planet Rock”) Bambaataa--by playing turntables as if they were magnificent synthesizers of unlimited capacity. The spontaneity of a good deejay’s invention was thrilling. The rappers, or MCs, who talked over the beats were considered subsidiary, there to pump up the party, while their deejays pumped 10 seconds of an old Jimmy Castor record into art.

But the anticipated expense of purchasing rights to the records deejays borrowed from kept the number of samples to a minimum (or none: Sugarhill Records, the dominant label of the time, used a house band) and hip-hop records spotlighted rappers above all. (The first mix record, “Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel,” wasn’t released until 1981.) The producer supplanted the deejay as the dominant creative force. And along with the demise of the live deejay went any opportunity for spontaneity on the part of the rapper.

When you listen to early rap records, which were basically denatured re-creations of live performances, it becomes clear that the cliches of present-day rap performance were already well established in the ‘70s. At least half the songs praise the deejay; half invite the audience to party down.

By the beginning of the ‘80s, hip-hop had degenerated into a dog-and-pony act, gimmicky disco for kids to spin on their heads to . . . Break Dance!

With the release of Run-DMC’s first record in the middle of the decade, the cutting edge of recorded rap essentially became beat-box rock ‘n’ roll--rebellious attitude, dangerous edge and all. Rap performance remained a dance hall novelty, complete with the outdated call-and-response routines and unrestrained deejay worship. The sound changed, but the vision hardly at all.

(The aggressive nature of rap battles and unstructured deejay-centered hip-hop may have continued on a local level in the New York clubs but hardly made it onto the concert stage.)

Run-DMC’s stage-stalking, crotch-grabbing, gangster-style yelling, which became the model for a generation of hard-core rappers, was entertaining at first--DMC is a powerful live rapper--but quickly grew cliched. Such poppy rappers as M.C. Hammer and Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince rely on energetic dancing rather than music to carry their shows, like old soul-revue bands. Guys like Tone Loc--well, maybe just Tone Loc--can carry a crowd with just the sheer weight of their personalities.

Deprived of the element of surprise that even the hoariest rock ‘n’ roll acts can count on to relieve the monotony of their sets, rappers--all of them--rely on the same old formulas. They exhort their audiences to scream, to stand, to yell louder than the kids on the other side of the auditorium, as if they were rocking a disco instead of the Sports Arena.

They have their deejays, who are at this point in rap history basically there to drop the needle on the backing tracks and perform interminable turntable scratch solos, like the drum solos in ‘70s stadium rock. And always, inevitably, sometimes several times an evening:

Throw your hands in the air

And wave them like you just don’t care

And if you want to get rocked tonight

Everybody say, “Oh yeah!”

Public Enemy makes its shows exciting with the unpredictability of its oratory, not of its music. You never know if Chuck D is going to go off on the Supreme Court, or if Professor Griff (when he was still a member) would suggest, as he did at USC two years ago, that black men who date white women be burned alive. Each show is a potential media event. If you follow the band, however, you do know exactly what Flavor Flav is going to say to Chuck when it’s time to do “Cold Lampin’ With Flavor,” because the basic stage show is the same every night.

LL Cool J is among the most talented performers in rap, a man who recorded three million-selling albums before he was out of his teens, and whose polysyllabic, hard-core rhymes have been matched neither in ferocity nor virtuosity.

But he scored a major crossover hit a few years ago with rapped love ballads and tailored his live act to his new audience of young girls . . . to the extent that it became a slick, bloodless revue, complete with mirrors, lasers and an on-stage Ferrari, though without passion.

This winter, he showed up at the Palace to jam on an encore with Def Jam label-mates 3rd Bass. Over a funky beat, just him and a turntable, he spun a freestyle improvisation. “I juice the party like jumper cables,” he rapped, and he did. Without the smoke machines or a prepared backing track, his clear tenor and astounding machine-gun articulation cut through the torpor of the room like an electric knife; it was a great rock ‘n’ roll moment. This was live rap as it should be but hardly ever is.