POP MUSIC REVIEW : 2 Live Crew: The Mild Bunch : Amid controversy and fanfare, the raunchy rappers fail to generate much excitement.

The sizzle has gone out of Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew. The Miami rap group’s concert on Wednesday at Vertigo was mostly a non-event--like watching someone in his 16th minute of fame.

You get an idea how limited these guys are as rappers when you realize that the most lively performers on stage weren’t even on the payroll.

After an uneventful opening half-hour, four female fans voluntarily climbed on stage and began dancing as Campbell and his two male sidekicks went through one of their typically ribald tales.

Caught up in the intoxicating glare of the spotlight and the urgings of the crowd to “take it off,” two of the women began competing aggressively for attention.

In a marvelous test of the women’s exhibitionist instincts and the audience’s penchant for voyeurism, the pair began peeling off clothing--including sexy lingerie--and ended up rubbing suggestively against the rappers.

The sequence only lasted about five minutes in the hourlong concert and it probably wasn’t much more outrageous than what happens at the neighborhood bar during an especially lively wet T-shirt contest. But the dancers added some spontaneity to what was otherwise a tired routine. They also provided the only real touch of the sexual tease that many in the curious crowd--about two-thirds male--no doubt associated with 2 Live Crew performances.

If the trio of rappers had played here last summer right after their arrest in Florida on obscenity charges, there would have been a lot more sense of occasion.

At the time, the Crew was something of a mystery. Because its X-rated party records don’t receive radio air play, the only thing most pop fans knew about the group was what they had read. The question: Just how wild are these guys?

The Crew would have also benefited at the time from being the underdog in a worthy fight against censorship. Its “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” was the first recording in America ever declared obscene by a U.S. court.

Even Bruce Springsteen came to their aid, allowing Campbell to use the melody of “Born in the U.S.A.” for an anti-censorship record called “Banned in the U.S.A.”

But 2 Live Crew--which continues its tour tonight at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim--has become an old story. Anyone curious enough to pay $20 see the group Wednesday had probably already bought one of its albums or seen its video. So, they were all too familiar with the group’s raunchy, stag-party flavor--a basically one-joke attack.

One sign that the curiosity has waned was that only 250 of the 1,100 tickets for Wednesday’s concert had been sold by 8 p.m., according a Vertigo employee who was hoping for a strong walk-up business. Yet there didn’t seem to be any last-minute stampede, leaving the room far less crowded than on a typical Friday or Saturday dance night.

The crowd tried good-naturedly to pump some spirit into the evening by repeating Campbell’s bawdy slogans and rhymes, but the material was simply too one-dimensional for any of it to catch fire. The only inviting moments musically occurred when the Crew relied on the melodies of two old rock hits, Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night.”

If Campbell proved weak as an entertainer, he came across as likable enough as a person--both in a press conference at the club before the concert, where he defended his music quite articulately against the censorship charges, and on stage, where a constant smile showed that he doesn’t take the whole thing too seriously.

What was also clear was that the performance was exactly what Campbell has maintained from the beginning: a comedy show, not--as has been charged--a serious attempt at the kind of hard-core pornography that arouses an audience.

The strongest emotion raised by the show, perhaps, was anger at the legal and law enforcement authorities around the country who have wasted their time and taxpayers’ money (as much as an estimated $500,000 in Florida alone) to try to stop this group, whose act may be juvenile but is clearly not obscene under U.S. Supreme Court guidelines of community standards, prurient interest and artistic merit.

On the other hand, it’s hard to feel sorry for Campbell, who has made millions of dollars because of the added record sales created by the controversy. How appropriate that the two most common words in his stage vocabulary rhyme with luck and rich.

2 Live Crew and Kid Frost play tonight at 8 at the Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. Tickets: $20.50. Information: (714) 999-9536.