POP MUSIC REVIEW : Ice Cube Keeps the Heat On : In Santa Barbara, the rapper remains outspoken but cautions his fans, ‘We don’t need any fights. . . . I wanna come back here.’

B-a-n-g!

Fans walking toward the Anaconda club to see rapper Ice Cube were startled Wednesday night by the sudden, loud noise.

“Oh, my God,” one young woman said nervously as someone nearby instinctively covered his head. “I thought it was a shot.”

The noise turned out to be merely the backfire of a car a block away, but the incident underscored the uneasiness surrounding Ice Cube--and many rap shows--since the gunfire and street fighting that left at least five people injured and nine arrested after an Ice Cube concert Dec. 26 in Seattle.

Five security guards carefully frisked everyone who entered the club and the night’s opening act, Los Angeles rap group Da Lench Mob, tried to set a tone for Ice Cube’s performance by urging “peace” at the end of its set.

Because of the macho image of rap and the adage that a little controversy never hurts sales, some headliners might avoid remarks that might be interpreted as lecturing the audience.

But Ice Cube didn’t remain silent.

“We don’t need any fights,” the rapper said midway through his performance at the club, which borders the UC Santa Barbara campus. “It ain’t nothing but a party going on (tonight). . . . You know what I’m saying. . . . The thing about it is I never get to go to Seattle again because they (expletive) up. But I wanna come back here.”

The crowd cheered and threw its energy and emotion behind the urgent rap beat as Ice Cube demonstrated considerably more charisma and purpose than he had in the sometimes superficial nature of his shows on last summer’s “Lollapalooza” tour.

Though his language is sometimes so brutal and politically incorrect that he is considered extreme even by some hard-core rap standards, Ice Cube is one of rap’s most valuable and powerful voices--someone blessed with a perceptive eye and an original artistic impulse.

More memorably than Ice-T, he has expressed on record much of the helplessness and rage of disadvantaged inner-city youth--unsettling raps that assumed a ring of prophecy in the weeks after the L.A. riots last spring.

Constantly pacing the stage Wednesday as he and sidekick W.C. shouted the raps over the pounding beats, Ice Cube--wearing a blue and white bandanna around his shaved head--already seemed in mid-tour form, even though this was the opening night of the tour. The Seattle show was part of a three-city warm-up trek.

At “Lollapalooza,” Ice Cube was performing for an almost all-white rock audience that was unfamiliar with his songs--and he concentrated on a high-energy, party atmosphere that left little time for the softer, more reflective moments found on his records.

The Anaconda was filled with fans--a good portion of them up from Los Angeles--and Cube involved them by inviting them to take over the vocals at times. He could still add dimension and depth to the live show by using songs like “Dead Homiez” and “It Was a Good Day” that document his gentler side.

But Ice Cube, also a promising actor, is already one of the most commanding figures in all of pop and, at 23, he still has lots of time to grow.

One of his worries now is performing at all--with many buildings closed to him, he says, after the Seattle experience.

In some ways, in fact, Wednesday’s show was the tour’s “hometown” date because Ice Cube hasn’t played Los Angeles in years and there is no date on the current itinerary. The problem isn’t that Ice Cube--or other rappers--incite crowds to violence, but that gang members are fans of hard-core rap and skirmishes could erupt in urban areas.

In his hotel room before the concert, Cube said the incidents of trouble at his shows are rare--maybe only “four or five times” in an estimated 250 shows.

“But you never get credit for the good shows where everybody comes and has a good time,” he said. “People, for instance, must have thought the Seattle show was a one-city tour because they didn’t hear about Portland or Houston, where we went next and where there weren’t any problems.”

Even in Seattle, he added, the trouble was after the show--not during the show as many of the media reports suggested.

“The troubles are a reflection of society,” he said. “There is probably just as much violence at lots of sports events during a year, but rap involves young people and the music goes against the grain and that makes it more frightening to people.

“If people listened to the music, they would see that much of what we’re saying is a reaction to generations of violence. We want it to end. We want to build a better community, so that our kids can have a future.”