Popularity of Video Magazines on Fast Forward : Issues that focus on rap, heavy metal or country music include interviews with stars and are climbing the Billboard chart

The corner desk of music video director Modi was cluttered--smothered under magazines, Rolodex cards, snapshots, letters, videotapes, music cassettes, contracts and other papers. She was back in the Sunset Boulevard offices of Video Publication Industries after a morning in a North Hollywood editing studio, awaiting the delivery of the latest edition of “Slammin’,” the video rap magazine she heads.

Her mood was one of excited confidence. After all, the first issue of “Slammin’,” which featured on-camera interviews with rap stars Ice-T, Tone-Loc and others, made it well into the Top 20 of Billboard’s music videocassette chart. This trend has been much the same for the company’s other video magazines, including those focusing on heavy metal and country music, as video magazines find a quickly expanding audience in a variety of genres.

Along with such successful competitors as the hard-rock oriented “Hard ‘N’ Heavy,” VPI’s hourlong videos, issued every two months, are seen as a valuable promotional device for record labels. At first, some labels were hesitant to provide music videos and other material on their artists without compensation.

“Record companies are banging down our door,” said Modi, who uses only one name. “This is pure promotion for them. Everything is much easier. The first issue was really difficult. Now, I just kick back and let the phone ring. The only thing I seek out now is new bands.”

Laurie Kaye, who produces the video magazine series with company founder Stuart Shapiro, added, “it’s taken until as recently as three weeks ago to get a couple of the holdout record labels to see our promotional intent. But some of the more visionary labels see that video magazines are the wave of the future in publishing. Eventually, every magazine will have a video counterpart.”

Indeed, Kaye added that some of the major labels are working on producing their own video magazine packages. But she intimated that those videos will be most concerned with promoting only a particular

label’s artists, while independent productions like VPI’s “Metalhead” can delve into some of the fringe elements of the hard rock scene.

Recent issues of “Metalhead” have included short features on artists and fashion designers that cater to rock stars.

The first issue of VPI’s “Country Music Video Magazine” created controversy for singer k.d. lang, when Modi and her video crew also taped the singer’s commercial for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for the magazine. In that spot, lang pets a cow while protesting American meat-eating habits. The resulting controversy had lang’s music banned from some radio stations that serve cattle country.

But the video magazine market may soon get crowded. Modi said that she has run into video crews from competing “Hard ‘N’ Heavy” at recent interview shoots for Kiss and David Lee Roth. She added that “Hard ‘N’ Heavy,” which was the first to release a metal-oriented magazine, and her own project have different aims and personalities.

“Metalhead,” she said, snips out the most profane words spoken by interview subjects, and has a $12.95 price tag. The 80-minute “Hard ‘N’ Heavy” censors nothing and costs $19.95. “It’s very obvious that while we’re on the same subject, we’re both doing different things.”

RIOT ACT: The last time local punk band Bad Religion found itself at the center of a riot was about seven years ago at some long-forgotten Hollywood show. But at least the band managed to get on stage before the show was closed.

When it happened again, at North Hollywood’s Classic Theatre Dec. 29, headliner Bad Religion was still hours away from its set.

The nighttime scene at the Lankershim Boulevard movie house ended violently when the fire marshal stopped the concert for overcrowding, and more than 300 angry fans destroyed chairs inside the venue and smashed nearby storefront windows. Police have estimated damage at $20,000.

Fire officials have charged that the audience numbered more than the theater’s 1,400 limit.

For Bad Religion guitarist-songwriter Brett Gurewitz, backstage during the melee, it was not something anyone would expect to see in the 1990s, at least a decade since the punk scene peaked in Hollywood.

The band was to perform songs from its “Against the Grain” album, which has sold 65,000 copies in its first three weeks of release. But when he arrived at the recently reopened movie theater, Gurewitz said, he found an unusually small stage and a barricade that filled the space separating it from the seats.

“Even if there was not a full-scale riot, I knew a lot of kids could get hurt,” he said. “Our fans are a high-energy crowd. There was no area for them to them to dance in.”

Bands Bad Religion, Instead and Lost perform Feb. 1 at 8 p.m. at the Palladium, 6215 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. Tickets are $17. For tickets and information, call Ticketmaster at (213) 480-3232.