Tunes for The New Ice Age

By JAY COCKS

) "Well I guess it would be nice/ If/I could touch your body . . ./ But I gotta think twice/ Before I give my heart away/ And I know all the games you play/ Because I play them too."

Right now, no one is playing the pop game as cannily as George Michael. Faith, with all that body language, spent three recent weeks at the top of the U.S. singles chart. The Faith album, which contains last summer's smash I Want Your Sex ("Sex is natural/ Sex is fun/ Sex is best/ When it's one on one"), is currently holding down the second slot on the top pop albums and looks to be good for some more heavy hit-single action.

Michael is the latest and, by the look of it, most enduring of the recent British presences on the American charts. Other current London rages like the bands Swing Out Sister and Curiosity Killed the Cat have also made a heavy Stateside impression by concocting easeful pop that shirks issues and shrugs off anything more serious than having a good time. Major American talent like Bruce Springsteen often carries a big thematic stick, but Britpoppers wield a club -- a nightclub where the solipsism of Thatcher's England is chilled out, prettied up and danced to till dawn. If you have the world's weight on your shoulders, after all, you can't shake your booty.

That kind of shared attitude is ripe material for satire, and, indeed, the current Britpop scene has its shrewdest, severest critics right at the center of its matte black heart. The Pet Shop Boys mock the scene from the ideal perspective: deep inside. Their inventive synthesizer work makes music so stylized it becomes otherworldly. In the words of one admiring London critic, "They know how to use their computers." The Pet Shop Boys' tunes are inventive and danceable; It Couldn't Happen Here, on their new album Actually, was co-written with the formidable film composer Ennio Morricone. Their lyrics are jagged fragments of social observation and romantic speculation honed to a keen cutting edge. Two lines from Rent put it neatly: "I love you/ You pay my rent."

The new Britpop is lighthearted and featherweight. The producers Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman run a kind of pop-star atelier in South London, where "we have pretty much a hard and fast rule that no one we work with is over 25. There are too many aging rockers hanging on to the charts." Actually, it was SA&W that had a stranglehold on the English charts for most of 1987. The production team sold 35 million singles and 12 million albums, and they like to say "We are the charts." "They're very contemporary in what they do," says Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. "However, their lyrical content is not, even they would admit, particularly interesting." SAWtooth productions like Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up are basically transmigrated American soul tempered down and slicked up into a formula that makes fashion as much as music. "A single really is a three-minute throwaway piece of plastic," says Stock, as if he's talking about a miniskirt. "It's nothing greater than that. But it's entertainment."

If that approach sounds as close to Vegas as King's Road, the reason may simply be the premium placed on showing the audience a good time. That is not just what matters most. In Britpop, it is practically all that matters. That and a marketable image. Consider the personal particulars of one reigning superstar: Favors tight denims and Ts torn in strategic locations. Drives a black Mercedes, owns a seven-seater Cessna and a condo in Newport Beach, Calif. When not referring to himself in the third person, will say things like "My bank is all in my head" and "When I'm not being a pop star, I'm knackered from being a pop star." Posed for penumbral cover photograph on latest album in cruciform earring, bare chest and black leather jacket, head turned and nose inclined downward with right arm raised high, apparently checking for underarm odor. Has made, according to informed speculation, some $20 million, and will spend some seven months of this year concertizing and dodging the tax man. Was called "absolutely gorgeous" by Princess Di. Is it a) Wayne Newton or b) George Michael?

The encomium from the definitive pop princess is probably a giveaway, but in fact George Michael would be equally at home at a stadium concert or on the stage at Caesars Palace. His Faith album, written, arranged and produced by his own self, is a proclamation of independence, heavily indebted to contemporary black music and especially to Prince. It is furlongs better than anything he did with Wham!, the duo that sold some 50 million singles and albums and played a farewell concert to 72,000 fans at Wembley Stadium, an event of epic proportions that passed largely unremarked and unlamented outside the hermetic sphere of Britpop. Michael is an impressive and free- ranging singer who delivers a tune like Boy George on steroids. But his fondness for drama can slide into grandiloquence with the turn of a note. He is singing black and selling white.

The debut album of Terence Trent D'Arby, a 25-year-old American-born black singer now working in London, is Michael's inverted. The record summons up memories of Marvin Gaye, even as it glazes over its funkiest moments with a slick studio veneer, like a custom car getting a detailing. Says Barney Hoskins, a British rock critic: "D'Arby's the perfect example of this designer soul movement. He's the perfect commodity. He's light brown, he dances well, he's pretty, but he's too slick." Michael and D'Arby are solid songwriters. Faith is irresistible, Bo Diddley for the '90s; Father Figure, a double-edged love song that is simultaneously sentimental and somehow threatening, is the best thing on Michael's album. The best tune on D'Arby's turns out to be a Smokey Robinson composition, but Terence still makes a strong showing on his own with If You All Get to Heaven and If You Let Me Stay, which have a glancing, gospel-like intensity, an aggressive edge underscored by the singer's own hang-tough stance. Tough is mostly what's missing from Britpop, whether it's the SAW stuff, or the easygoing jazz inflections of Swing Out Sister, or the songs of Curiosity Killed the Cat, which are as undifferentiated as Kleenex and quite as dispensable.

All this reliance on technique and surface flash flirts with fashion (Cat Vocalist Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot turned his cap front to back and started a fad) and plays fast and loose with the built-in impermanence of pop. It also makes most Britpop inbred and narcissistic and ripe for a revisionism that may already be happening. Upstart groups like the Godfathers, the Zodiac Mindwarp & the Love Reaction, and Gay Bikers on Acid are harking back to the brash activism and overheated playing of the late-'70s Clash era. In Hull, 150 miles north of the London scene, the Housemartins are purveying a pared-down rock with simple instrumentation and lots of political power heard to excellent effect on their most recent album, The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. "In the north," reports Paul Heaton, Housemartins founder, co-songwriter and lead singer, "there aren't that many bands that can afford syndrums, synthesizers, brass. We're afraid to embrace full modern-pop production because sounding like a total pop band would be going with society a bit too much. That goes against our values."

Weaton calls himself a radical socialist, but the Pet Shop Boys, who shy away from direct political writing and look like fashion objets themselves, end up saying the most about the Britpop scene and about the years of Thatcher's England. Shopping, from their current album Actually, sounds like a recessional hymn for a fashion show until Tennant's lyrics catch hold: "Our gain is your loss/ That's the price you pay/ I heard it in the House of Commons/ Everything's for sale." Britpop may be so smooth and cool that it has brought a new ice age to the charts. But Tennant and his partner Chris Lowe are the Houdinis of this whole show.

The magician, by myth, found himself, while performing one of his most famous escapes, trapped underwater in an icy river. He found air bubbles between the hard ice and the water's surface, and they were enough to sustain him until he broke through. The Pet Shop Boys are on to this trick. They know, like Houdini, that the cold helps set the legend.

With reporting by Liz Nickson/London