Cool Hand Lucas : On a path that led from Copenhagen to New York’s Lower East Side, newcomer Lucas is proving the rap may have been born in the ‘hood, but its got a global appeal.

It is late on a weeknight, and silence prevails in the dimly lit, fifth-floor hallway of the Hit Factory--the renowned, midtown Manhattan recording studio.

Until the door to Studio A3 opens.

Inside, a tall, slender young man with a round crew cut and a matching 5 o’clock shadow stands in near-darkness behind a glass panel, grinning while he playfully babbles into an overhead microphone.

“Click, click, click, clock,” pops and rolls off the tongue of 23-year-old rapper Lucas, the quirkiest arrival to hit the pop world since Beck unleashed his loser’s litany at the beginning of the year. Lucas is preparing to record vocals for a song he’s recording for director Nora Ephron to consider using in her upcoming film, “Mixed Nuts.”

“Ah-one-two, ah-one-two,” he continues in his mid-range, New York-accented voice, jerking his shoulders back and forth and rhythmically bobbing his head. “What’cha gonna do when the L-U-C is comin’ after you?”

Lucas’ antics, while breaking up the engineer at the soundboard on the other side of the glass, might lead an outsider to believe he has flipped his lid.

He has.

And so have multitudes of listeners and viewers across the United States, Canada and Europe who have heard his catchy, left-field hit “Lucas With the Lid Off” and seen its illusionist, black-and-white video.

The energetic and cerebral single, which combines ragtime jazz horns and booming bass rhythms with reggae chatting, scat singing and strong rapping, is an across-the-board smash. Drawn from Lucas’ new album “Lucacentric,” it is soaring up the nation’s pop, rap and modern rock charts. ( See review, Page 70.)

While the hip-hop arena may seem like the most logical place to promote Lucas, his record company is also trying to cultivate an audience for him on the college and alternative scene.

“I felt out of place when I heard the song on an alternative station after a Soup Dragons record,” Lucas says with a chuckle, sitting at a console and pulling on the strings of his gray, hooded sweat shirt--a hoody , in hip-hop-speak. His equally hip-hop blue-and-gold suede Puma sneakers lie on the other side of the console. “I just couldn’t picture all these long-haired alternative rock kids listening to me.”

That’s because Lucas Secon, born in Copenhagen to a Corsican Danish mother and a Lithuanian American father, has had hip-hop culture flowing through his veins since he first visited New York in the summer of 1983, when he was 12.

His parents had recently divorced, and Lucas, an only child, was making the first of what would become annual summer visits to his father’s home in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

That summer, and the next few after, “old school” hip-hop’s golden age was flourishing. Break-dancing, graffiti art and block parties featuring rapping and deejay contests were all the rage with young people in many of New York’s predominantly African American and Latino communities. When Lucas glimpsed elaborate graffiti murals on playground walls and saw spinning, twisting break-dancers bust their moves on pieces of cardboard on the sidewalk, he was hooked.

Lucas’ steady immersion into hip-hop helped him break free from what he describes as Denmark’s culturally restrictive grip.

“There’s a limited amount of creativity coming out of Copenhagen,” he says. “There’s a conformist mentality, and there’s no room for a subculture. I love rap because it’s uninhibited.”

And when you’re raised by a mother who’s a surrealist painter and a father who for years wrote songs for the Mills Brothers, as Lucas was, a little thing like freedom of expression is vital.

Leslie’s Dance Studio in the East Village’s Broadway/Lafayette section was Lucas’ entree into the culture in which his career and life are so firmly entrenched.

Jeff Otero, who was then a member of a dance, rap and graffiti art group called the Scrambling Feet Crew, taught curious kids the acrobatics of break-dancing. After Lucas signed up for lessons, he gained a mentor and confidant. Otero, now an aspiring rapper and producer, remains a good friend of Lucas’.

“His father brought him in one day,” Otero, 27, recalls. “There were hardly any other white kids who came down there. He was mad shy and he thought he didn’t fit in. I told him to loosen up.”

Lucas soon did, especially after Otero brought him to his Lower East Side block and introduced him to his neighborhood friends. Together, they frequented some of the city’s hippest dance and rap clubs, such as Roxy’s and the Fun House. Otero would also bring Lucas to his apartment, where he’d school him in rapping, scratching, mixing and recording, using a microphone, tape deck, turntables and sequencer.

As Lucas raps on his song “Born,” which he dedicates to Otero: “I used to have ideas, yo / But couldn’t freak the sample technique / Had so many words / But I couldn’t speak / Until my man Jeff set me free.”

L ucas originally developed his love of music as a child, when the sounds of jazz giants Miles Davis, Clifford Brown and Benny Goodman wafted through his house from his father’s record player.

When his father thought Lucas was old enough, he’d take him to Copenhagen jazz clubs to hear African American performers--many of whom were ex-GIs who had just completed their tours of duty in Vietnam.

Not surprisingly, then, big-band, be-bop and cool jazz styles are abundant on “Lucacentric.”

“The music is always in my head,” Lucas says. “Jazz is inspirational. Be-bop introduced syncopation and off-key notes, which I love to use.”

Lucas also loved writing poetry as a teen. In 1990, one year before he was signed to his first record contract, Lucas won one of Spin magazine’s Golden Poet Awards for a piece he called “The Ice Age.”

But his first album, “To Rap My World Around You,” was met with an icy reception by American hip-hop fans, and his label, Uptown/MCA, subsequently dropped him from its roster. Discouraged, Lucas left for London in search of a more receptive audience.

At that time, Lucas said he felt like “the muted trumpet” he describes in the “Lucacentric” song of that name--someone who had the control of his image and style, from look to lyrics, usurped by record company executives.

B ut Lucas now admits that his debut album’s flopping was partly his own fault.

“Last time I wasn’t ready,” he says. “I tried too hard to sound like Rakim (of the seminal rap group Eric B. & Rakim) and I didn’t use the broad scope I represented.”

How broad?

Check these “Lucacentric” flavors: a couple of spoken-word pieces accompanied by skeletal jazz arrangements; vintage big-band horns complemented by nifty ska and dancehall toasting by Jamaican vocalist Junior Dangerous, and cleverly crafted, poetic lyrics, expertly rapped.

Lucas, who wrote, produced and arranged the entire album himself, uses song titles such as “The Statusphere,” “Livin’ in a Silicone Dream” and “Inflatable People” as metaphors for the record’s essential themes--the pitfalls of fast fame, the perils of instant gratification and record companies’ fickle treatment of their artists.

The album’s most ambitious track, “Spin the Globe,” features guest rappers from Uganda, India and France rhyming in their native tongues, joining Otero and Lucas rapping in Spanish and English, respectively. The song contains more than 60 samples, including some played backward.

“I’ll never do another song like that again,” Lucas says, chuckling again.

Another of Lucas’ defining characteristics, his exuberance, is reflected in his vocal impressions, when he growls and scats in the high and low registers. When this and equally vibrant music collide, some of his songs, such as “Inflatable People,” sound like the soundtracks to colorful, comical cartoons.

As his manager, Chris Barstow, fondly says of his client, “He’s hyperactive. His brain is always in overdrive.”

S howmanship and charisma aside, Lucas also displays a savvy beyond his years.

On “Red, White and Blues,” for example, he employs a dog-tired, beleaguered groan over a mid-tempo track to convey his disappointment with America’s political climate. Using the metaphor of being victimized by an unfaithful girlfriend, he raps: “You said / ‘Come over to my place / So we can make love / Yeah, so we can make love’ / It spun my head / But when I got there / David Duke and Noriega were in your bed.”

But experimental and adventurous music plus cunning lyrics--no matter how slamming the beats are--doesn’t always garner the support of African American rap fans, the genre’s largest and most influential constituency.

“I don’t know if Lucas’ record will hit hard with hip-hop’s core audience,” said Marcos Flores (a.k.a. Ronin Ro), a staff writer at the Source, the nation’s leading rap journal. “The music is intriguing, but listeners want to cut to the chase. They want to know if an artist is ‘ghetto’ enough, if they are voicing their concerns. That’s what Lucas is walking into.”

Rappers such as Dream Warriors, Definition of Sound, Del the Funky Homosapien and Divine Styler are just a few performers whose critically acclaimed albums didn’t earn big sales or get much radio or video airplay.

And Lucas must also contend with an additional stigma.

“When you’re white,” says Otero, who is Puerto Rican, “you have a strike against you in the rap game because the black and Spanish people who started it might doubt that you’re really down and that you’ve got skills. I told Lucas, ‘If you got skills, bring it on. Be true, be yourself and don’t use gimmicks.’ ”

Lucas’ skills are obvious, and he’s historically shared them with black artists, from his guest rap on Chubb Rock’s 1991 song “Bring ‘Em Home Safely” to his production of albums by Shara Nelson and Junior Dangerous.

“He sounds like he has the necessary resume,” Flores says. “He’s got to stay true to the core audience. Hopefully, his record company won’t pass him off as the next Beck.”

Barstow says that Black Entertainment Television has “Lucas With the Lid Off” in its regular rotation on its video music programs and that Lucas has been invited to perform at the ultimate proving ground, Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.

Lucas says he is confident about being embraced by African American audiences because he is true to the game.

“There’s nothing more insulting than someone who fronts about living in poverty and exploits someone else’s culture,” he says. “That’s imperialism. If I exploited black culture, then I’d expect blacks to be prejudiced against me. But I respect other rappers and they respect me. How could the other artists I’ve worked with want to keep working with me if they thought I was an exploiter?”*