Pop : Rob B: Britain Raps

Over the last 30 years, the British have been to American culture what the Japanese have been to American technology: Through slavishness to form they’ve slicked it, they’ve made it marketable, they’ve made the machinery run.

The essence of hip-hop--larcenous appropriation of other people’s beats--has formed the basis of British pop music from Adrian Sherwood to acid house to EMF. And it was inevitable that a white British guy would eventually learn to rap . . . and to rap more professionally--and dispassionately--than many of his American peers. Saturday, in a midnight show relocated from the Palace to the mammoth Fantasia disco in the Puente Hills Mall, rapper Rob B of the Nottingham-based Stereo MC’s might have been the Pet Shop Boys of rap.

A skinhead bundled up in a hooded parka, Rob B bobbed to the electronic beat and rhymed in a style that somehow recalled half the rappers on the market without being immediately identifiable with any of them; less anonymous than universal, neither a pastiche of black poses like Vanilla Ice nor an aggressively white thing like the Beastie Boys. Rob B’s was the kind of performance Gary Oldman might have come up with if he’d been asked to play a rapper in a film, and pretty forgettable for all of its easy virtuosity.