POP ALBUM REVIEW : Macho and Mean Rap From Luther Campbell

Don’t get fooled again by 2 Live Crew.

Luther Campbell, the group’s leader, may deserve support in the obscenity battles growing out of 2 Live Crew’s last album, but he doesn’t deserve our money for his new solo album, which will be released Tuesday.

Despite the greater comic invention and the more sophisticated musical grooves this time, Campbell’s basic approach continues to offer a dour, ultimately ugly view of sex. It’s all relentless, macho posturing with men giving the orders and women simply following.

All this raunchiness may have been expected.

Campbell has no obligation to abandon the X-rated approach of the group’s first three albums. To do so, he could maintain, would be to concede victory to those who have tried to outlaw his music.

But his right to make this kind of music doesn’t make it any more listenable--much less entertaining.

There is, too, one crucial difference between the new album and 2 Live Crew’s earlier albums: an unnecessarily mean spirit.

After the Miami rap group’s last album--”As Nasty as They Wanna Be”--became in June the first pop recording ever declared obscene by a U.S. District Court, more than a million people have bought the album, probably to see what the fuss was all about.

What they discovered was a collection of mostly boring, X-rated stag-party tunes by a largely undistinguished rap group.

However shallow and stupid the music, it was also clear that there was no more reason to declare “Nasty” obscene than the thousands of similarly sexually explicit books and videos that are available in every city in the land.

This realization turned Campbell into a hero of sorts--a major symbol in the growing debate over censorship crusades against pop music.

Concerned about the principles involved, Bruce Springsteen allowed Campbell to use the chorus of “Born in the U.S.A.”--one of the most stirring and successful songs of the ‘80s--on Campbell’s recent “Banned in the U.S.A.” single.

Doug Morris, president of powerful Atlantic Records, was so outraged after the rapper was arrested for performing material from the album at an adults-only club in Florida that he agreed to distribute the “Banned in the U.S.A.” single and additional 2 Live Crew recordings.

The alignment with a major label was important because it gives Campbell, whose records were previously released independently, more corporate muscle to influence record stores to carry the “Nasty” album despite the Florida court ruling.

This same impulse to support an underdog may lead another million people to buy Campbell’s new solo album, also titled “Banned in the U.S.A.,” as a vote for freedom of speech and the First Amendment.

Think twice.

The “Banned in the U.S.A.” single was a reasonably clever response to the legal turmoil in Florida--a provocative but strictly PG affair that maintained Campbell and his group are victims of racism and political opportunism.

That song also opens the new Campbell album, but the rapper and his musical cohorts soon return at several places in the album to the crude, sexually explicit humor of “Nasty.”

More disturbing is the nastiness of some of the commentary. The rapper’s reaction to the campaign against him is nicely framed on the “Banned in the U.S.A.” single, which was designed with radio airplay in mind. Not so elsewhere on the album.

One especially distasteful sequence finds Campbell weaving Florida Gov. Bob Martinez and his wife into one of the rapper’s sexually explicit diatribes.

Martinez once called for a state probe to see if Campbell violated racketeering and obscenity codes with his music, which makes him fair game for satirical attack. Yet the language is too pointed to be accepted as simply good locker room humor.

Similarly, Campbell employs derisive, anti-gay terminology and imagery in lashing out at others who have opposed him, including rival rappers.

Hey, Campbell may say in the style of Mick Jagger when he talks about rock ‘n’ roll: It’s only a joke, don’t get so uptight.

But we don’t have to support his bad taste in order to defend his right to make these records.

Buying the “Banned in the U.S.A.” single may be an appropriate way to show support for Campbell and the First Amendment. Buying the “Banned in the U.S.A.” album isn’t. Send a letter to your congressman instead.