POP MUSIC REVIEW : Knott’s Plays It Safe With Good-Time Rap : The Buena Park amusement park wants its entertainment contemporary and popular. When it comes to rap, it also wants it non-controversial.

When that preserve of old-time Americana, Knott’s Berry Farm, turns to rap music to pull in a big weeknight crowd, it’s obvious that rap itself has come in from the fringes and turned into its own slice of Americana.

Young MC, a product of the Los Angeles rap scene’s Wild West, packed Calico Square, in the heart of the theme park’s replica of an Old West ghost town. The first of his two shows Thursday night drew several thousand people--among them plenty of moms and dads with rap-enthusiast offspring.

For Knott’s, as for the many youth-oriented advertisers whose commercials move to the thump of a beat box, it’s good business to be associated with rap.

“Live entertainment is something that can separate us from any of the other amusement parks. We know the importance of (booking) talent that is contemporary and popular,” Knott’s publicity director, Stuart Zanville said Thursday afternoon, before Young MC’s scheduled evening shows. And these days, “contemporary and popular” defines rap, which has figured twice in the summer dance-pop series at Knott’s (To lure an older contingent, the park also continues to present the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, who plays at Knott’s tonight and Monday).

In July, Knott’s presented a bill headlined by the Los Angeles rapper Mellow Man Ace, whose act includes a fair amount of salty sexual braggadocio. “We didn’t get any complaints,” Zanville said. Still, Knott’s takes an act’s reputation into account. It’s not a likely venue for any of rap’s political controversialists, or its X-rated sex exploiters.

Young MC, a former USC economics major whose real name is Marvin Young, is an uncontroversial, good-time rapper who fits right into the show biz mainstream. Young co-wrote Tone Loc’s sexy mega-hits, “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina.” Despite some suggestive, PG-rated notions, neither of those songs, nor anything on Young’s 1989 debut album, “Stone Cold Rhymin,”’ is as sexually extreme as that convincingly salacious Jerry Lee blazing through “Breathless.”

As for Young’s politics, they don’t get any more controversial than “Just Say No,” the imaginative title of an anti-drug rap on his album. For that matter, few of the rappers who specialize in tales of street violence have uttered a line as chilling as the one in Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

Nobody objects to such sentiments coming from a well-loved entertainer who wears a cowboy hat. But don’t bet on Knott’s booking any rapper who tells a parallel story of crime and consequences set on ghetto streets. It’s not the violence itself that keeps these rappers out of the entertainment mainstream represented by a place like Knott’s--shoot-’em-up entertainment is, after all, as American as the establishment’s fruit pies. But rap’s depictions of violence are a bit too real: They dredge up facts of underclass life that the safer, more comfortable majority would rather not confront.

In any case, Young MC’s raps don’t deal in such messy realities. His show was dominated by familiar conventions of pop shtick and, at the same time, suffered from many of the cliches and drawbacks unique to live rap. That combination of deficiencies both old and new made for a ho-hum performance.

Rap, as has often been pointed out, is technological music that comes alive in the studio, but leaves little for a performer to add in the flesh. It takes a vibrant presence and a knack for storytelling to inject personality into a rap show and focus attention on the substance of the narratives strung among the beats. Only a few rappers can pull that off, and Young didn’t indicate in his early show that he was one of them.

Elements of the 35-minute performance (short by any standard but rap’s, where mini-sets are the norm) came right out of the can of old show-biz tricks. The show started and ended with taped sound effects depicting helicopter clatter on Young’s arrival, and a jet’s takeoff rumble on his departure. The show also included an orchestrated noisemaking contest between the boys and the girls (The rappers have picked up on this gimmick, formerly popular among the heavy-metal arena set). Like a confirmed trouper, Young also made sure to flatter the crowd at every opportunity.

When rap becomes shtick (a Yiddish word coined by an earlier generation of minority entertainers), all gaps have been bridged. It may be new music, but it’s show biz in the old tradition.