POP MUSIC : A Reason to Celebrate : Arrested Development transcends the party beat--it’s spiritual humility and the fight against oppression that fire up leader Speech

Arrested Development’s star-making debut single of last year, the already-classic “Tennessee,” may go down in the history books as the first major sad rap hit. Not bitter, not raging or recriminatory, just flat-out, soul-and-heaven-searchingly heartsick.

Given that hip-hop as a form has tended to buttress about every basic instinct but melancholia, especially anger or abandon, such rueful desolation stands as no small accomplishment. Even so, the poignancy in this signature song has passed right by some less-sensitive listeners, the group members are aware.

“People are always complimenting us on the song, about how it’s helped them out a great deal spiritually,” says Headliner, the deejay of the Georgia-based group, about the mournfully nostalgic, gospel-tinged tune written by his longtime best friend, Speech. “And then some people come up and say, ‘That’s a nice dance tune.’ ”

This kind of critique isn’t taken as the compliment intended.

“We try to let those people know that it’s not a party song,” Headliner says. “It’s a song that brings forth the existence of two people that actually passed on--Speech’s grandmother and brother--and is about a lot of past-tense experiences that happened in the South.

“We try to let them know that not every tune you hear with good music behind it is for partying.”

Appearances can be deceiving, though. Arrested Development is the group, after all, that refrains from using the pedestrian word concerts in reference to its galvanizing live performances, preferring the more pretentious-sounding yet wholly appropriate celebrations .

Against a backdrop of haystacks and chicken cages designed to evoke the rural background of most of the members, these shows start off with youngest member Montsho Eshe dancing alone with every limb in a maelstrom of motion to an African rhythm, then get no less feverish as the other members take the stage, swirl around each other, move into the audience and effortlessly rabble-rouse.

Even during--perhaps especially during--”Tennessee,” which was written in the form of a baffled prayer, you’d just about have to have recently lost a grandmother or brother yourself to be so closely in touch with Speech’s original intentions as to not want to, well, party.

Entering the lobby of his Universal City hotel the day after an awards-show appearance in town, Speech (a.k.a. Todd Thomas, 24) is easy to spot, even though he’s on the diminutive side and the place is crawling with fellow rap and R&B; musicians and their entourages: He’s the one wearing the T-shirt boldly emblazoned with the image of Christ.

Asked later about the gospel touches in “Tennessee,” and the sense of exuberance that inevitably accompanies its performance, Speech lets loose with a speech that is at once accepting of and reluctant toward celebration as a tonic for society’s ills in the black community.

“Gospel is sort of like blues to me,” he says, sitting in a hidden corner of the hotel restaurant, whose waiters--all fans, they confess--cast occasional glances through the ferns. “African people are very much a people of rejoicing. We love to rejoice for almost any reason. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. I guess it’s our coping mechanism, to cope with the ridiculous amounts of repression that we’ve basically accepted and internalized within the latter generations of African people here in America.

“Once you’ve internalized the oppression in order to deal with something that you definitely feel is gonna be there for the rest of your life, instead of going head-on with it, you just cope with it.

“I think blues and even hip-hop are a way of coping with a situation that we’ve basically accepted as reality. But I haven’t, Arrested Development hasn’t, there are many people that haven’t accepted this as being a reality for us forever. And I guess that’s what Arrested Development is about--evolutionizing and getting beyond a state of arrested development, which we feel we’ve been in for a long time.”

Arrested Development’s debut album, “3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of . . . ,” is a mixture of rap, R&B; and in-one’s-face public social consciousness with the occasional personal concern.

Promptly upon its release in April, it proceeded to arrest the attention of the public (nearly 2 million albums sold, with two Top 10 pop singles so far) and the critics (coming close to topping The Times’ 1992 reviewers’ poll, for one).

Not the least of the elements that make the album so intriguing to a wide audience is the Christian or post-Christian spiritual sense infusing large pockets of it.

Speech is an ex-Baptist who fervently prays to God throughout “Tennessee” but spends the whole of “Fishin’ 4 Religion” taking the black church to task for supposedly preaching pie in the sky while glossing over the more immediate needs of the community. He finds churches’ avoidance of “political” issues irreverent as well as irrelevant.

“Me personally, I think real spirituality is political,” he asserts. “Every second of your life is based on that spirituality. When a person has discipline in their spirituality, it affects them politically, because it affects them period.

“In Western civilization, you have a lot of separation--religion is a Sunday thing, and then Monday through Saturday is business or politics. But real spirituality can’t be like that. If you truly believe something, you believe it Monday through Sunday.”

Speech didn’t develop these kinds of opinions just for the sake of provocative album fodder. Several years before “Fishin’ 4 Religion” was released, he wrote to his former pastor in his hometown of Milwaukee, outlining the general complaints that ended up in the song. (“He never did reply, really. He replied with three or four sentences basically telling me to shut up,” Speech says with a laugh.)

He expounded on other topics in a column called “20th Century African” that he used to co-write for the Milwaukee Community Journal, an independent paper owned by his parents. And he and the group were indulging in goodwill missions to homeless shelters and the like--even temporarily adopting a drug addict’s daughter during the ’91 Christmas season--before there was any album out to promote with an altruistic publicity stunt.

In an era when even Madonna claims the loose mantle of “spirituality,” Speech’s very specific thoughts about that term set him apart from the pack. And he’s not terribly impressed with any alleged growth of spiritual thought among his contemporaries.

“I’ve yet to really hear too many hip-hop groups other than Arrested Development speak of being submissive to the Creator. They use spirituality to empower themselves in a sense, and sort of dis everybody, and basically say, ‘Well, I’m a god and I’ll dis you.’

” No . The hardest part about being a spiritual person is actually giving up control of yourself and allowing the Creator to go through you. Once you pass that threshold, you’re pretty much in there. Because then you’re no longer controlling your own destiny. The Lord controls your destiny from that point on.

“And so I’ve yet to see too many rap groups, at least, come out with the submissive aspect--which is the major aspect of spirituality.”

Humility wasn’t always the hallmark of Speech’s pre-Development years.

Before AD, the two founders of the group first met up at the Art Institute of Atlanta when Headliner, new to the school and peering at a flyer Speech had put up looking for collaborators, suddenly found the friendly young man who’d posted it standing next to him, introducing himself. For Headliner, who grew up in Savannah, Ga., and was “very nervous” about his future, finding someone so full of ideas seemed a godsend: “Once I met Speech, my outlook on life totally changed in an instant. It’s different when you’re around someone who’s wanting to do other things besides foolish, mischievous things.”

Not that they completely avoided adventures that would seem foolish in retrospect. Together, the two pals formed a series of short-lived rap groups with names such as Disciples of a Lyrical Rebellion that--hard as it might be for fans to fathom now--tended toward the decidedly less-than-spiritual gangster-rap vein.

“We would use the word bitch , we used to say ho , we used to use a lot of profanity in the songs,” admits Headliner (a.k.a. Tim Barnwell, 25), who is a year older than Speech but speaks of him in the reverent tones of a younger brother.

“We were basically trying to find an identity, to place ourselves in life. We started out doing a lot of party records. I always knew that I would not be doing this type of music all the time, because it wasn’t really beneficial. We wanted to come with something of substance; we wanted something that people could actually relate to.”

Speech agrees that the search for a musical self took a while. “I really was sort of rebellious as a youth,” says the group leader, who was reared in Milwaukee but spent summers working in his Tennessee grandmother’s fields. “I wasn’t doing really well in school--I used to fight a lot, and it carried on within the music. Plus, gangster rap was the thing to do, so we were doing it without thinking twice about it.

“But as we started to grow as individuals--spiritually, culturally--we began to realize that that wasn’t the route we wanted to take. And the more things we learned, and the more thirsty we got, the more it started leaking through the music and it evolutionized into life music , which is what we have today.”

But before there was “life music” (like celebrations , another band euphemism) there was one more phase that didn’t quite fit. In 1988-89, the two friends caught on to Public Enemy’s highly influential second album and found the substance they had instinctively hoped for. The silly and salacious stuff went out the window, but there was one new problem to reckon with: They were semi-rural Southerners trying mightily to sound like street-hardened New York militants.

Gradually, the music softened and developed more emotional complexity. Rasa Don joined on as drummer, and as other male members departed what was becoming Arrested Development, they were in some instances replaced by women, including “extended family” member Dionne Ferris (who sings on “Tennessee” and has a solo deal in the works) and singer-dancer-stylist Aerle Taree (a cousin of Speech’s)--the co-ed angle coming about purely by “mishap” and not design, they say.

A 60-year-old “spiritual adviser,” Baba Oje, became part of the official lineup, giving Arrested Development diversity in age as well as gender. And a bittersweetly hopeful feel more genuinely reflecting their country-bred Southern roots replaced the pseudo-urban pretensions.

Not that they want to be tagged by anyone in their relative non-militance as “that nice rap group.”

“I think a big mistake that a lot of people make is they speak about ‘positive’ music, thinking that they’re helping a cause,” Speech says.

“But the problem is, many people don’t even know that there’s a problem. The problem is the root of our album; it’s positivity that is the spirit of the album. We’re speaking of it because we feel confident and optimistic about solving the problems. But problems are the main point of it. You have to be positive about something. You can’t just be optimistic about the world when you don’t know what’s really going on.”

But if Speech has little tolerance for the positivity school, he has little use for those he sees as wallowing in a negative condition. In the song “People Everyday,” he divides blacks into two categories: “Africans” and “niggers.”

He would include in the latter group those who would use the word for themselves as a term of endearment, gangsta rappers definitely notwithstanding: “To me (it’s) a derogatory term. . . . given us by people that were oppressing us, and I don’t see it as something that we should switch around and use. . . .”

He defines the term as someone who “understands that he or she is oppressed but wallows in oppression. An African, by contrast, is one who understands that he or she is oppressed but is in a constant struggle to break out of the oppression.

“So it’s two totally opposite mind states. . . . There’s no way they can really get along, because they have totally different mind-sets of what needs to be done in life.”

The song “People Everyday,” he says, depicts a small-scale clash between his two categories of black Americans: “The moral of the story is that we’re all people every day, all in this same mess together and that we need not be fighting each other.”

Speech’s last word, characteristically, is a more peaceful-sounding Public Enemy paraphrase: “We need to fight the problem.”