Do You Wanna Dirty Dance?

By JAY COCKS

Rock is in its second childhood. Senility is not pending, but familiarity certainly is, as rock's raffishness gets currycombed by nostalgia, spiffed up and repackaged for more genteel consumption. The musical past is being reprocessed, in all sorts of unlikely places, from shopping malls to concert stages. A second generation is starting to catch the beat of the music their parents grew up with, the music that, very often, helped their parents grow up. If all that is a little disorienting, or even baffling, remember the words of the classic R.-and-B. tune: "The little girls understand."

That is precisely the sort of song -- raw and nasty, full of bluff brimstone -- that never made it into the carnal candy land evoked by the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing. The shrewdly calculated saga of a girl's coming of age in 1963, the film Dirty Dancing is responsible more than anything else for this new slew of what might be called pube rock. The movie was so perfect a young teen dream, it became almost poignant. You had to see it to believe it, and many did. Dirty Dancing pulled in $65 million at the box office and is still going strong at the video stores.

This week a Dirty Dancing concert revue comes to Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, with a brace of nostalgically inclined singers and a bevy of pelvicly primed dancers. After eight shows at Radio City, the concert will head out to 65 cities in the heartland. "How many people here under 20?" shouts Bill Medley, once a Righteous Brother and now the revue's closing act, before jumping into (I've Had) The Time of My Life, his hit theme from the movie. His question gets a good roar from the crowd. "How many over 20?" Another roar. The show, which combines live performance with taped oldies, offers up similarly canned memories: blasts from a past now distant enough to seem quaint.

The Dirty Dancing concert tour might be just another oldies show if it were not for the fact that the record business has already scoped out a trend that goes beyond recycling oldies. Producers are trying to realchemize the sound of early '60s pop with singers too young to know the decade by anything but rumor and parental reminiscence. Tiffany, a 17-year-old singer from Norwalk, Calif., had a surprise No. 1 hit last year with her version of the Tommy James and the Shondells 1967 hit I Think We're Alone Now. Tiffany, who concertized in shopping malls to reach her public, is working on a new album, which will face heavy competition in the pube-rock field.

Atlantic is making a strong bid with Debbie Gibson, 17. She may sing like a Muppet baby, but her first album has already fostered four Top Five singles. Capitol counters with Tracie Spencer, 12, whose first album came out last month, while A&M has Shanice Wilson, 15, who landed her record contract by winning a talent contest. Even Tracy Chapman, 24, a singer-songwriter out of Boston, sounds like a flashback. Her warmly praised debut album resounds with high purpose, in marked contrast to the growing legions of pube rockers, but to anyone who actually made it through the '60s, Chapman writes protest just like Phil Ochs and sounds just like Odetta out for a ride in a convertible.

Pube rockers, who tend to be more aggressively wholesome than Madonna Wanna Be's, are all busy trying to sound like Classic Belters Brenda Lee and Lesley Gore, but they share separate turf. Lee and Gore and other icons of the '60s had an edge in their voice, an ache in their heart. The pube rockers put a tune over with a kind of suburban satisfaction that can be cute and even, like Tiffany, buoyant and appealing but never goes any deeper than the label on a 45.

Depth, of course, can get in the way of a clear-cut good time, and part of what makes this young rock so successful is the shared avoidance of soul, a substitution of fantasy for flesh. The best song on the Dirty Dancing records is a piece of elaborate contemporary pop, Eric Carmen's Hungry Eyes, that recaptures the high, wide feeling of '60s music without trying to mimic it. It was hard anyway, even growing up with rock 'n' roll, to define what it was. All anyone ever really knew was that rock was the real thing, a way for a lot of kids to find a balance, share a feeling, even, sometimes, stay ahead and stay alive. It's not that way anymore. For the millions who saw the movie or buy the records or check out the concert, these songs are no longer reflections of immediate experience. They are bedtime stories.