COLUMN ONE : Rap Furor: New Evil or Old Story? : Pop artists from Sinatra to Prince have been accused of going too far, say gangsta music’s defenders. But critics claim this time ‘a line has been crossed.’ Either way, the debate hits the raw nerves of race, free speech.

It was a song rumored to be so lewd not even the First Amendment could stave off the outrage.

Politicians called it obscene. Radio stations were pressured to ban it. The FBI, backed by audio technicians, spent more than two years trying to pinpoint the smuttiest verses. Boosted by the hype, the record sold millions of copies and became a teen-age anthem.

The latest misogynistic rap song? A grunge rocker’s ode to necrophilia? The offending lyrics, in fact, belonged to nothing more deviant than “Louie Louie,” the Kingsmen’s 1963 chantey, which has since been immortalized in telethons and wine-cooler ads.

With metronomic regularity, American society has sounded the alarm over each new spin on popular music, condemning it as cruder, less melodic and more volatile than genres of the past--be it jazz, swing, rock, punk or heavy metal. Frank Sinatra, mesmerizer of impressionable girls, once was denounced as the country’s “prime instigator of juvenile delinquency.” Later, it was Elvis, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Metallica and Prince.

Now the battle is being waged again, this time over “gangsta rap,” an ambiguous term that has served as both prejudicial slur and cynical marketing ploy. Although a fraction of the multibillion-dollar recording business, it has become the lightning rod for a national debate over free speech, cultural values and corporate responsibility.

The furor has shaken up the entertainment industry’s boardrooms and galvanized presidential politics. It has pitted complaints of artistic censorship against charges of economic exploitation. It has pinched the raw nerve of race, exposing deep divisions even within the black community over the music’s harsh and explicit imagery. And in a small Texas town, it has added weight to an unusual lawsuit--filed by the widow of a slain police officer against rapper Tupac Shakur--that could redefine the legal limits of musical license.

If history is any gauge, much of the tumult likely will appear overblown and paranoid in hindsight, given that even the most scandalous artists tend to mellow into nostalgic respectability over time. But in his indictment of Hollywood this summer, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) insisted he was not just a stodgy septuagenarian trying to steal the fun of a younger generation. This time, Dole argued, “a line has been crossed--not just of taste, but of human dignity and decency.”

His assessment, although shared by a majority of Americans, raises the same nettlesome questions that have kept this debate alive year after year: What is the yardstick for measuring whether a line has been crossed, especially when critics have issued similar warnings for decades? If a line has been crossed, when and where did it happen? Is Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” qualitatively more objectionable than Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff?” Who makes those decisions? Who should impose them? And why bother, if denouncing a record only heightens its commercial allure?

“I think that people who are troubled by gangsta rap have legitimate concerns, but the question is: What do you do with those concerns?” said Florida attorney Bruce Rogow, who successfully defended 2 Live Crew after its album “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” was ruled obscene by a federal judge. “Do you suppress the speech, or do you use that speech to educate yourself and your children and your community? I think the discussion is healthy, but it’s got to be done with an underlying ability to tolerate the uncomfortable and the threatening.”

Question of Race

What most distinguishes the attack on rap from previous musical uproars is the question of race, America’s great unsettled dilemma, which has long colored attitudes about crime, sexuality and the entertainment world.

Unlike rock ‘n’ roll, which involved the appropriation of African American rhythmic structures by white performers, gangsta rap is marketed as an authentically black musical expression, which has nonetheless proved appealing to white suburban teen-agers. That commercial crossover--and the extent to which it shapes white America’s vision of the black experience--is at the core of many arguments for and against the violent and demeaning lyrics.

Gangsta rap’s advocates point out, for instance, that the music raised few eyebrows as long as its message was directed at inner-city listeners, whose lives presumably mirrored the gritty themes of their favorite songs. Only after white kids helped turn acts such as Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg into shopping mall bestsellers, they contend, did the middle-class mainstream begin raising fears about rap’s potentially corrosive effects.

“The problem isn’t the lyrics on the records--it’s the fear of the white kids liking a black artist,” declares Ice-T on his “Body Count” album, before launching into a first-person account of bedding down with the daughter of a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.

One of the more surprising defenders of this perspective is Sgt. Ron Stallworth, a Salt Lake City gang cop, who paid little attention to rap until he noticed that “quote, unquote, good clean white Mormon kids” were beginning to emulate the black gang symbolism depicted in many recordings.

Although he concedes the music can have a negative influence, he insists that it is unfair to single out rap for condemnation, especially when it represents a small--and shrinking--fraction of an entertainment market already saturated by violence. Instead, in his frequent lectures around the country, he urges officers to listen to rap in a cultural context, as a realistic dispatch from society’s fringes.

“Whether or not we like the music, these rappers are expressing their perception of life in America based on how they’ve had to live it,” said Stallworth, a 21-year veteran who serves as Utah’s gang intelligence coordinator. “Do I like it when they express their thoughts about killing a cop? No. Do I understand why some of those thoughts get expressed? My answer is yes. We get angry because of the language they use, but they’re literally telling us, on a day-to-day basis, what’s wrong with this country.”

The flip side to that argument is to view gangsta rappers not as streetwise reporters but as cynical minstrels catering to a white audience’s appetite for outlaw fantasies. The real racism, some critics contend, is the marketing of the gangsta mystique itself, which they say promotes the same ugly stereotypes--violent, hyper-sexual, predatory--that have been used to vilify black men for centuries.

New York essayist and music critic Stanley Crouch calls it “the selling of coon images.” He compares the record executives who produce gangsta rap to high-tech slave traders. And he accuses the white consumers who buy it of seeking vicarious ghetto thrills. “All you have to do is go to Tower Records or turn on MTV, and there you are, in the darkest black America, where savages run free and wild,” said Crouch, a 49-year-old jazz aficionado.

What makes those images even more noxious, Crouch argues, is that they are presented as the badge of black authenticity, not a criminal aberration. When the hard-edged grunge band Nine Inch Nails sings about crude sexual subjugation, “they don’t pretend like they’re the ‘real’ white people.” But when groups such as the Geto Boys engage in the same posturing, he notes, they righteously defend themselves as the uncensored voice of the ‘hood.

From a commercial perspective, there never has been anything quite like the gross-out raunch of the Geto Boys, or its eccentric one-eyed, midget rapper, Bushwick Bill, who thanked Dole for supplying about $300,000 in free publicity by singling out the group as a peddler of “mindless violence and loveless sex.”

A case could be made--as Bushwick does on his morbid, sometimes darkly comical, solo album “Phantom of the Rapra”--that such music was never designed for highbrow listeners, but for an alienated inner-city audience that understands his slasher-style hyperbole. “Opera . . . deals with sex, rape, violence, incest and suicide, you know, and it’s accepted by the same people that are willing to ban rap,” he says on the album. “Rap is opera to people in the ghetto.”

Venerable History

A case could also be made--as Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. did in 1990 when he testified at the 2 Live Crew trial--that such exaggerated off-color imagery has a long and venerable history, with roots in the African American oral tradition of “signifying” or “playing the dozens.” This form of heavy-handed parody, in which “rappers” try to one-up each other with the most extravagant insults or lies, is seen as a sly way of turning age-old stereotypes on their head.

Or, after listening to a record that revels in gang rape and chain-saw butchery, you could just conclude that “there’s sort of no way to make it respectable,” said veteran rock critic Dave Marsh. “This isn’t middle-class morality or conventional Judeo-Christian values.”

But to Marsh, whose books include “50 Ways to Fight Censorship,” it is precisely that outsider’s perspective--culturally, racially and economically--that makes voices such as Bushwick Bill’s so indispensable. Unlike Elvis’ swiveling hips or John Lennon’s comparisons to Jesus, Marsh contends, today’s attack is aimed at America’s underclass and its access to the mainstream media.

“This is about freezing people out,” said Marsh, who condemns the anti-rap campaign by Washington insiders William J. Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker as ‘90s-style McCarthyism. He points to the firing in June of record executive Doug Morris, Time Warner’s staunchest advocate of cutting-edge music. Although Morris’ dismissal was said to be the result of a management dispute, critics of the media giant took credit for ousting him and predicted that others soon would get the boot.

“If you listen to what they’re really saying, their objective is to purge the entertainment industry of people whose ideas they disagree with,” Marsh said. “I find that morally repugnant.”

Yet even people with a deep respect for creative freedom sometimes blanch at the disturbing art that freedom can create. On a purely aesthetic level, it can be difficult to reconcile an affection for African American music with the negative tone that resonates through so much of rap.

‘Perverse Modernism’

In her 1994 book “Hole in Our Soul,” Martha Bayles contends that something terribly sour has permeated popular music, or at least those genres that treat real musicianship and life-affirming lyrics as the traits of a sellout. But unlike other critics offended by this “cult of obscenity, brutality and sonic abuse,” she neither advocates censorship nor denigrates the rich traditions of jazz, blues, gospel or even rock ‘n’ roll.

A former Wall Street Journal art and TV writer, Bayles pins today’s woes on an avant-garde strain of European art-school thinking that she calls “perverse modernism.” It is this nihilistic philosophy, not African American music, that she blames for introducing the idea of “art as a game or a publicity stunt . . . designed to grab attention or blow people’s minds.”

Tracing the roots of this deviation, Bayles ends up fingering the Rolling Stones, which she describes as the first rock band to graft the concepts of excess and exhibitionism onto the traditional blues structure. Punk rock took it further. Gangsta rap, she argues, is just the latest incarnation of those anti-social, anti-art impulses.

“There was a time when people at the bottom of society listened to the blues, which had some anger in it, some raunchy humor and some bad-man characters . . . but it also had a lot else,” said Bayles, who remains hopeful that black music’s early spirit eventually will reassert itself. “Everything was always presented in balance, as part of a more complete picture of human life. Gangsta rap takes the worst out there and just wallows in it.”

It is one thing to debate whether that is good or bad--morally, aesthetically or politically. It is another to debate whether gangsta rap adversely affects its audience--or more precisely, whether a song’s psychological impact can be measured or even identified.

There are no unequivocal scientific techniques for determining that, only judges and juries. In the past, they have rejected claims that subliminal messages, purportedly inserted in heavy-metal songs by Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne, could be held responsible for young listeners committing suicide.

Explicit Lyrics

A new legal challenge is brewing, however, this time against the far more explicit lyrics of Tupac Shakur, who has been sued in southeast Texas for allegedly inciting a teen-age gang member to gun down a state trooper after being pulled over near Victoria, outside Houston. Ronald Ray Howard, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1992 murder of Officer Bill Davidson, said that a tape of Shakur’s “2PACALYPSE NOW” was blaring from his car stereo when he loaded his 9-millimeter pistol and pulled the trigger.

“The music was up as loud as it could go, with gunshots and siren noises on it . . . and I was so hyped up, I just snapped,” Howard told The Times in a 1993 interview. At the moment of the shooting, he was listening to the song “Crooked Ass Nigga,” which describes a drug dealer on a rampage, also armed with a 9-millimeter pistol:

“Comin’ quickly up the streets is the punk ass police

The first one jumped out and said, ‘Freeze.’

I popped him in his knees, and I shouted, ‘Punk, please!’ ”

In the lawsuit, which could go to trial in U.S. District Court this year, lawyers for Davidson’s estate contend the album is essentially “a call to a battle,” the musical equivalent of falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.

Shakur’s lyrics about cop-killing are incendiary, they allege, especially when “repeated, mantra-like, to the accompaniment of a booming bass beat.” Moreover, they argue, his message is directed at a violent inner-city subculture with an avowed hostility toward police. As evidence of Shakur’s own criminal orientation, they point to his many run-ins with the law; he’s currently in a New York prison for sexual assault.

“Under these circumstances, it is more than reasonable that Shakur and his co-defendants, already intimately familiar with the psychopathic gangsta mind-set and lifestyle, should foresee that their course of action would lead to exactly the sort of tragedy that occurred here,” attorney Jim Cole said in the suit, which also names Interscope Records and Time Warner.

Arguing that the lawsuit “distorts that tragedy,” Shakur’s attorneys say it’s absurd to hold him responsible for an irrational reaction to a fictional song.

While conceding that much of the album’s language is harsh, they also reject the label “gangsta rap,” insisting the recording is a collection of poems about ghetto life that sometimes depict violence but never promote it. Because more than 400,000 people purchased “2PACALYPSE NOW” and didn’t kill police, they add, it clearly poses no direct threat or imminent danger--the primary constitutional test for determining the boundaries of free speech.

“All of my client’s songs are just parables with a theme: that violence against black people is a continuing problem, that resisting oppression is a good thing, that the wages of drug dealing are death,” said R. James George Jr., who represents the defendants. “If folks actually listened to the whole album, instead of picking out little pieces of it, I think they would think that’s a pretty good message.”

The fact that some can view a message as the antidote and others as the disease speaks to the ambiguity of the gangsta rap debate, a complex excavation of the nation’s psyche that can be interpreted from many contradictory perspectives. Which is a little like “Louie Louie” itself.

‘Louie Louie’

The song, penned in 1956 by Los Angeles musician Richard Berry, is an innocuous account of a lovesick sailor’s desire to return to his Jamaican sweetheart. After the Kingsmen made it a hit, a rumor quickly spread that some salacious verses had been added, supposedly audible when the 45 r.p.m. single was slowed to 33 1/3. Scoring a bootleg copy of the graphic “real” lyrics became a teen-age prize.

Under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s direction, G-men crisscrossed the country, trying to determine whether obscenity laws had been broken. Cryptographers listened to the record over and over, hoping to decipher the most vulgar passages. After 2 1/2 years, the FBI concluded what the Kingsmen must have known all along--their singing was so garbled that the words were unintelligible at any speed.

“Louie Louie” was only as nasty as you wanted it to be.