POP MUSIC : The Age of Rage : Led by Guns N’ Roses, a brazenly aggressive energy coursed through the top albums of ’91

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

Prison camp captain Strother Martin’s reference to inmate Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke,” the 1967 movie about a struggle between bullying authorities and a man who refuses to give in, could have served nicely as the precede to many of 1991’s most significant albums.

This was a year in which much of the most forceful music dealt with anger and alienation--and it was fitting that Guns N’ Roses was the band that actually used Martin’s voice from the film, because it was the band that gave us the year’s most defiant and audacious music.

The songs in “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II,” the two albums that were released simultaneously in the fall, aren’t thoughtful and responsible in the manner of works by U2, Bruce Springsteen, Prince and most of the other artists that held the leadership reins in pop-rock over the past dozen years.

For most of the 2 1/2 hours of the “Illusion” albums, Axl Rose expresses the resentment and rage of someone who feels he has spent much of his life as pinned down by outsiders as the Newman character in “Cool Hand Luke.”

This aggression was echoed in many of the year’s other dominant works, including, to varying degrees, albums by Metallica, Nirvana, Anthrax and Soundgarden. These artists aren’t expressing the politically focused energy and emotion of the ‘60s, when the issues--from civil rights to Vietnam--were easily identified and shared. It’s more the howl of individuals who feel trapped or abused by forces beyond their control.

This new rock ‘n’ rage has struck a chord with many young people who are part of what sociologists speak of as the first generation of Americans to expect less than their parents in terms of the American Dream.

And the anger wasn’t limited to rock. Rap’s most powerful albums--by Public Enemy and Ice Cube--also lashed out. The difference is that Public Enemy’s Chuck D.’s cry for black unity was fiery but controlled. Ice Cube’s rage was unchecked--peppered with racial and ethnic slurs that led to the year’s most disheartening debate in pop.

Ice Cube is one of rap’s most commanding figures, and he has repeatedly denied charges ranging from anti-Semitism to inciting violence, but opponents continue to call his album hateful and, in one case, have even urged a retail boycott.

There is a lot of overreaction in the campaign against Ice Cube, but he is not blameless. He may be right in saying that he is using the controversial words as literary devices, not as vessels of hate. But he should have been aware that many listeners were going to reject his defense as easily as they rejected his music.

By going ahead, he neutralized to a large degree what was one of the year’s half-dozen most important albums. Instead of focusing debate on inner-city injustices, he made his own motivation the topic of the debate. That doesn’t dilute the power of the record, but it does undercut much of its influence.

Here’s my ranking of the year’s 10 most powerful and accomplished albums.

1. Guns N’ Roses, “Use Your Illusion II” (Geffen). It’s more than Axl Rose’s tantrums and bad-boy pranks that make this band one of the few mainstream groups in recent years to stand alongside the the Rolling Stones and the Doors in the tradition of rebellious hard rock.

Guns N’ Roses can be thoughtful and poignant. If you didn’t know that “Civil War,” the opening song on “Illusion II,” was by the L.A. group, it would be easy to think that its lyrics against war and hypocrisy were from the U2 songbook:

Look at the shoes you’re filling

Look at the blood we’re spilling

Look at the world we’re killing

The way we’ve always done before .

Look in the doubt we’ve wallowed

Look at the leaders we’ve followed

Look at the lies we’ve swallowed

And I don’t want to hear no more.

Similarly, there is a tenderness, lost innocence and regret in such songs as “Estranged” and “Yesterdays” that could have been expressed by any of a number of pop-rock’s most respected mainstream writers.

Sample from “Yesterdays”:

Yesterday, there was so many things

I was never told

Now that I’m startin’ to learn

I feel like I’m growin’ old.

One of the things that makes Guns N’ Roses such a vital band is that it is able to place emotions this personal alongside the anger and aggression of such songs as “Get in the Ring” and “Right Next Door to Hell” (from “Illusion I”). This isn’t music that is carefully filtered. It is music that virtually explodes, and the band is spitting in the eye of rock convention as surely as any of the great punk bands of the ‘70s.

They could have picked up more critical support by toning down some of the anger and compressing the albums into one. They could have endeared themselves more to the hard-core rock audience by dropping some of the ballads. They could have moved more safely to the mainstream of rock by eliminating some of the venom.

But the band rejected all of those easy options. Instead, it gave us a double jolt of honest, if often unruly and disturbing, rock ‘n’ roll emotion. This was the album from 1991 that rock ‘n’ roll won’t forget.

2. U2, “Achtung Baby” (Island). Though it doesn’t share the anger of many of the other albums on the list, “Achtung Baby” represents a dramatic step from the lightness and reassurance of earlier U2 collections. That’s why this album too is a risk.

U2 worked hard to establish itself as the new kings of inspirational rock, giving us a series of albums--most notably “The Unforgettable Fire,” “The Joshua Tree” and “Rattle and Hum”--that were committed to finding and maintaining the faith to overcome life’s recurring disillusionment and doubts.

This time, U2 descends dramatically into the troubled back streets of experience as the Irish band examines questions of troubled relationships, identity and self-worth. It’s not as fully developed an album as “The Joshua Tree,” but it is still a major work that opens a door to even more penetrating and revealing statements. The textures, often gritty and siren-like, are among the band’s most assured.

3. Sting, “The Soul Cages” (A&M;). The richness of ambition and intensity of expression in this series of warmly philosophical and nakedly tender songs make the album fit comfortably into the introspective tradition of such classic pop excursions as John Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band” and Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.”

A somber but also soul-stirring work that grew out of the English singer-songwriter’s confusion and grief after the death of his father, “The Soul Cages” also has the feel of a man re-examining his personal value system.

4. Nirvana, “Nevermind” (DGC). Far more than Metallica, this Aberdeen, Wash., trio finally bridged the voids between the punk, metal and college-alternative sensibilities. One reason is that Nirvana has made music that matters (it rocks and it provokes thought) without sacrificing the essential underground attitude of not taking itself all that seriously.

The grinding, guitar-driven music on “Nevermind” invades your nervous system so fully that it takes a while before you even get past the heavy layers of sarcasm and bratty insistence in Kurt Cobain’s vocal tone and try to start unraveling the riddles and cul-de-sacs in his lyrics, which speak about youthful indecision and doubt with so much indecision and doubt that you feel you are listening in on Cobain’s thought process rather than the final draft of a song.

5. Guns N’ Roses, “Use Your Illusion I” (Geffen). While generally more hard-rocking and spunky than “Use Your Illusion II,” the album’s highlights rest in the melancholy “November Rain” and in the extraordinary “Coma,” a 10-minute descent into rock ‘n’ roll darkness that is as unsettling a stretch of music as anything since the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street.”

6. Public Enemy, “Apocalypse ‘91: The Enemy Strikes Black” (Def Jam/Columbia). Chuck D. deserves the title of the Bob Marley of rap more than ever in this collection, in which he combines his usual flair for wordsmanship with a new-found instinct for diplomacy. He now calls for black unity and pride without condemning all outsiders as guilty. If that makes this album less urgent than some of Public Enemy’s previous works (and Ice Cube’s “Death Certificate”), it was--as in the case of U2--a necessary expansion of artistic horizon.

7. Dinosaur Jr., “Green Mind” (Sire). Even more than Nirvana, this Amherst, Mass., trio led by J Mascis can’t seem to decide whether making records is a blessing or a nuisance. The group has lifted apathy and youthful uncertainty to a new art form. The question in these largely apolitical songs isn’t whether to vote but whether to get out of bed in the morning. Don’t, however, overlook the obvious. There is enough underlying vision in Mascis’ writing that he could well emerge as the Paul Westerberg of the ‘90s--unless Nirvana’s Cobain beats him to it.

8. R.E.M., “Out of Time” (Warner Bros.). After the soggy mainstream infatuation of 1988’s “Green,” the ‘80s’ leaders of college-alternative rock return with a second creative wind, serving us an album as tuneful, personal and revealing as any band has ever done eight albums into a career. “Losing My Religion,” a song about losing faith in anything once believed important, is one of the year’s supreme moments.

9. Metallica, “Metallica” (Elektra). This may be the best-sounding rock album in years--clean, pure yet relentlessly hard. Rather than sell out, Metallica has made its metal assault more compact and broadened its emotional range in ways that speak to a wider audience without any loss of integrity.

10. P.M. Dawn, “Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience” (Gee Street/Island). De La Soul continues to be rap’s cleverest unit and Digital Underground its wittiest, but this New Jersey duo stepped past them both this year because P.M. Dawn’s music--with its hippie-minded extension of Soul II Soul’s silky hip-hop excursions--was the freshest and most potentially influential. “Set Adrift on a Memory Bliss” was the hit, but other tunes, including the melancholy strains of “Reality Used to be a Friend of Mine” and the dance-floor vigor of “Shake,” are equally classy.