POP MUSIC REVIEW : Brown Gets Lost Between the Choices

Bobby Brown is about nothing if not endurance. With “all night long” being the most often repeated phrase of the evening, his show on Friday at the Forum had as its sole theme the proclamation of Brown’s sexual stamina. Complete with demonstrations. Many, many, many demonstrations. Enough increasingly graphic and wearisome demonstrations to almost make you sorry Elvis ever popularized the pelvic thrust.

Say what you will about Brown, but he’s no sellout. On the plus side, mainstream pop success hasn’t caused him to sell out his serious R&B; sound, and some terrific hip-hop-based singles have resulted.

On the debit side, a well-publicized marriage to Whitney Houston hasn’t caused him to sell out his image as the premier bad boy of soul, an insatiable Everystud overselling his eagerness to have his way with every woman in the hall, replete with sleazy, unsubtle simulations of some of the varieties of technique available. That , he could stand to sell out.

Chalk it up to a serious identity crisis: Brown has no idea whether to be a real person or a generic sex-machine icon, and fumbles trying to have it both ways.

His gymnastic Lothario routine is a fiction, of course, and good business. But the inherent tastelessness of his show’s graphicness is compounded when, in one moment, he’s offering an aside about his pregnant wife, and soon after he’s on a hydraulic bed with one of his dancers, pretending to do the nasty at great, noisy length. We can realize the distinction between fantasy and reality but feel discomforted by the rude juxtaposition just the same.

These barriers aside, the show (the first of two nights at the Forum) was reassuring in some other purely musical ways. At last fall’s MTV Video Awards telecast, Brown’s voice sounded in dismayingly ragged shape, making you wonder how it would hold up under the rigors of a full tour. Happily, it has. His singing was supple and forceful on the ballads, and his rapping on the up-tempo numbers resounded with more confidence and authority than before; Brown’s synchronized rap with band member Stylz during the closing “Get Away” was an effectively climactic highlight.

And occasionally the pure physicality of the show proved deft. The dancers had the wholesome, aerobic approach of Hammer’s crew. There was one remarkable moment when Brown commanded a dancer to bring her rear end to him and, rather than slink toward the singer, she did a series of back flips toward him--an exuberant expression of sexuality that stood in contrast to the joylessness of a lot of Brown’s unsmiling hip- and tongue-wiggling.

At least Brown provides warning labels. “This part of my show is X-rated, so those of you who brought kids with you, cover those eyes,” he alerted the crowd late in his set, starting up the steamy ballad utilizing that hydraulic bed.

For any actual concerned parents, this warning may have been welcome, but belated, considering the torrent of gestures and language already unleashed at that point. When Brown eventually brought out five little girls to dance during the penultimate “My Prerogative,” given what “X-rated” stuff preceded, you felt a little nervous about their being there, as if the cast of “Annie Warbucks” were being incongruously trotted out at a Tropicana mud-wrestling show’s curtain call.

The presence of opening act Mary J. Blige was all the more appreciated, then, bringing a much-needed sophisticated moxie to the bill.

Freshman Blige isn’t nearly the accomplished performer that Brown is yet, and hasn’t quite developed the presence to electrify such a large hall. But, like the headliner, she successfully merges classic soul styles with contemporary rhythms. In the half-hour set culled from her “Where’s the 411?” album, she demonstrated the chops--and class--to last, particularly steaming it up in a closing duet with Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey.

Rap trio TLC added youthful ballast to the triple-bill package and provided a spunky happy medium between Blige’s relative maturity and Brown’s sex-you-up shenanigans.