Hard Knock Life Hits a New Stage

If you didn’t know better, you might have thought you’d stepped into a hard-rock concert Wednesday at the sold-out Continental Airlines Arena here.

There was a series of explosions onstage, fans waving lighters to salute their favorite songs and even a couple of artists suspended by ropes from the ceiling. And it might just be the hard-rock concert tradition that organizers of the Hard Knock Life tour, featuring rap stars Jay-Z and DMX, are hoping to tap into.

Even as rap’s record-sales cachet has increased in the ‘90s, it has seriously lagged as a concert attraction. Though hip-hop accounts for nearly 10% of all U.S. album sales, revenue from hip-hop concerts has been minuscule, due in part to promoters’ lack of organization and fans’ worries about danger at the shows.

In putting together Hard Knock Life, Def Jam Records is hoping to prove that hard-core hip-hop can consistently draw big crowds if it is attractively packaged.

The tour--which reaches Southern California in mid-April--certainly offers plenty of star power. Headliner Jay-Z’s 1998 album “Volume 2 . . . Hard Knock Life” was the first hip-hop album ever to top the pop chart for five straight weeks, and it won a Grammy last week for best rap album. DMX set another hip-hop precedent in 1998 by hitting No. 1 with two albums the same year: “Flesh of My Flesh Blood of My Blood” and “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot.” All three albums are still in the national Top 30. The tour’s other acts, Method Man (a member of the innovative rap outfit Wu-Tang Clan) and Redman, also have albums on the charts.

If the capacity attendance at Wednesday’s relatively seamless event lived up to Def Jam’s expectations, the performances themselves were often erratic.

Method Man and Redman, who joined forces for the evening’s opening set, fared best by tempering the usual hard-core hip-hop bombast with a healthy dose of self-effacing humor. Indeed, the rappers seemed to draw inspiration more from Cheech & Chong than any musical sources, trading goofy lines and cheekily paying homage to the virtues of sex, drugs and . . . hip-hop.

The rappers were equally spry and playful in a physical sense, bounding across the stage as a seemingly endless array of lesser-known guests and hangers-on streamed on and off. The street-party atmosphere was more captivating than the canned mix, which was dominated by a booming bass line and enhanced by a pair of live deejays, or the songs, which seemed to dissolve into a spirited but sometimes monotonous medley.

DMX adopted a more sober approach and was less endearing. On his recordings, this Yonkers, N.Y., native reveals a husky, richly textured baritone, but this seductive vocal quality was mostly wasted as DMX shouted hoarsely to the audience, as if in competition with the mix and his fellow rappers.

His muscular body clad in a black jumpsuit, sweat and jewels glistening on his face and body, he may have been a vision of feral sexuality, but his appeals to “the ladies”--or the cruder word he usually used to refer to women--seemed curiously stiff and overbearing.

It was Jay-Z who best captured the excesses and contradictions plaguing his style of hip-hop. While he proved a deft live rapper, with a strong, clear voice and a flair for easy syncopation, few of Jay-Z’s new songs sounded as crisp or driving as they do on his impeccably produced CD. And his casually glamorous, grandiose treatment of numbers such as “Reservoir Dogs” and “Money, Cash, Hoes,” and of the issues they address, could be disturbing.

At the beginning of the set, Jay-Z showed a film clip in which he and two cohorts appeared as convicts breaking out of a police van; toward the end, he showed another clip that paid tribute to the slain rap icon the Notorious B.I.G. The contradiction of glorifying the violence of street life while mourning one of its most famous victims seemed lost on the performer.

By the time Jay-Z finally launched into his smash single “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)”--the first rap hit to incorporate a sample from the Broadway musical “Annie”--some fans had already begun to filter out of the arena.

That the flash, edginess and raw power of hard-core rap continue to entice more and more fans seems beyond question.

The challenge for the artists, whose commercial success is based chiefly on studio ingenuity and video charisma, is to develop the technical chops and stage presence that live performance demands.

* Jay-Z, DMX, Method Man and Redman play April 16 at the San Diego Sports Arena, 3500 Sports Arena Blvd., San Diego, 7:30 p.m. $22-$37. (619) 225-9813. Also April 17 at the Arrowhead Pond, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim, 7:30 p.m. $27.50 and $45. (714) 704-2500.