X Rated

By RICHARD CORLISS

He struts onstage, and 17,000 New Yorkers start to cheer. Andrew Dice Clay tells jokes for a living -- dirty jokes, stag-party jokes, jokes designed to singe a churchgoer's soul and turn a feminist's stomach -- but he attracts crowds whose size and ardor would thrill a rock star. In sold-out Madison Square Garden, he looks like a samurai biker, with Brando's pout, Elvis' sideburns and a sequined jacket, its back stitched with the phrase DICE RULES. And he does too. He is America's rajah of comic raunch, ready to beguile fans who dress like him and talk like him and who have memorized his earlier routines from hit records and HBO specials. "I know you know the old s," he slurs between drags on a cigarette. "But it's a new decade, and I got new filth for ya." And he does too. Again the crowd roars.

So are the '90s destined to be the Filth Decade? What has happened to comedy, not to mention the English language, if a scoundrel like Clay can twist these fine old instruments to touch minds and make a mint? Clay may be at the rough edge of popular entertainment, but he stands there proud as well as profane, and he does not stand alone.

There's an acrid tang in nearly every area of modern American pop culture. Heavy-metal masters Motley Crue invoke images of satanism and the Beastie Boys mime masturbation onstage. Rap poets like N.W.A. and the 2 Live Crew call for the fire of war against police or the brimstone of explicit, sulfurous sex. Comedians like Sam Kinison and Howard Stern bring locker-room laughs to cable TV and morning radio. On network television, sitcom moms get snickers with innuendos about oral sex. In movies, the F word has become so common, like dirty wallpaper, the industry's conservative ratings board doesn't even bother to punish the occasional use of it with a restrictive R rating.

Words and ideas formerly on the extremes have engulfed the cultural mainstream. But have they polluted it? Many people think so. The moral right wing surely does, and it has friends in powerful places. Senator Jesse Helms fights to force artists to forswear any unwholesome intentions before receiving Government support. Alfred Sikes, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, leans on radio disk jockeys to clean up their acts. No less than the FBI sends a warning letter to a rap group. Susan Baker (wife of the Secretary of State) and Tipper Gore (wife of the Tennessee Senator), founders of the Parents' Music Resource Center, lobby for proscriptive labeling of certain albums. John Cardinal O'Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, inveighs against an Ozzy Osbourne song whose theme is suicide.

Stranded in the middle are the majority of Americans. They wonder at the effluence of raw language and worry about its impact on old-fashioned notions of civilized discourse. Is there room for subtlety and gentility in a culture overrun by expressions of gross intolerance? And what impact will this culture have on the first generation to grow up within it? Does this stuff have artistic merit? Is it tonic or toxic? Can we dance to it or comfortably laugh at it? Should we march against it or just sit back and enjoy it?

The understandable response would be to ignore the whole thing. But ignorance is not an option. The clash, however angry and ominous, is not just the usual dustup between raucous young stars and the professional squares who oppose them. It's not just about dirty words and bad attitude. The battle over pop raunch reflects a crucial fissure in American social and political culture that was born a long generation ago and came of age in the Reagan-Bush era.

On its face -- and as cued by the smiling faces of its Presidents -- the U.S. has breezed through a feel-good decade of peace and prosperity. The official culture is breezy too. A look at our most popular movies and TV shows suggests we are a nation of superheroes and pretty women, of Cosby kids and caring, thirtysomething L.A. lawyers. We make funny home videos and vacation in Disney World. And, at our peril, we let the rest of the real, dirty world go by.

Too often official America seems willing to let the rest of its own society go by too. It pretends the tabloid atrocities on TV news shows are aberrations. It either closes its eyes to the human street litter -- the homeless, the junkies, the insane -- or blames them for not getting with the program of self-help economics. It largely ignores the ghetto, where the black underclass has built its own furious culture on the slag heap of Great Society failures. It discounts much of the young white working class, in tattered towns and trailer parks, who feel left out of bland, sitcom America.

The makers of the new pop do not ignore this rage. They embrace, exploit and transform it. As the California rap group N.W.A. announces at the start of its album Straight Outta Compton: "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge." What they know from the street may not be what the heartland wants to hear. The message may be cleansing or hateful; the lyrics and limericks may expand or debase the language. And if X-rated pop adheres to writer Theodore Sturgeon's useful rule that "90% of everything is crud," most of it may be awful -- just dirty, not funny or erotic. But even at its grossest, the form is a vital expression of the resentments felt by a lot of people. Get used to it, America: we live in a four-letter world.

The evidence is especially strong in two areas:

Pop Music. "There's no message to heavy metal," says Penelope Spheeris, director of a documentary on the music. "It's about being rich and famous and getting laid." Nonetheless, metal has taken heat for a decade, with its electrified invitations to head banging and hell raising. Now other groups are taking the flak. Example: Guns N' Roses, the talented but loutish rockers whose album Appetite for Destruction has sold almost 9 million copies. Their song One in a Million says, "Police and niggers, that's right, get outta my way./ Don't need to buy none of your gold chains today . . ./ Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me./ They come to our country and think they'll do as they please,/ Like start some mini-Iran, or spread some f disease./ They talk so many goddam ways, it's all Greek to me."

Gore of P.M.R.C., which is in favor of labeling but not censorship, talks of 14 million children "at risk" and in need of counseling thanks to the "graphic brutality marketed to these kids through music and television." Lawmakers in 19 states went further; they considered proposing warning labels for any song dealing with such topics as drugs, incest, murder and suicide, which would conceivably outlaw depraved works like I Get a Kick Out of You, Die Walkure, Frankie and Johnny and Tosca. The music industry quickly forestalled such legislation by decreeing that record companies will decide which material is controversial and alert consumers with a label that reads PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LYRICS.

Whatever heavy metal can do to provoke censure, rap can outdo. Whereas metal is mostly suggestive, this urban-black music is often politically or sexually explicit. N.W.A. (Niggers With Attitude) won an admonishing letter from the FBI for their song FTha Police, in which the singer warns the ghetto's occupying force: "Ice Cube will swarm/ On any m f in a blue uniform . . ./ A young nigger on the warpath,/ And when I finish it's gonna be a bloodbath." Another group, Public Enemy, has been charged with anti-Semitism in their lyrics and statements to the press. But their songs are also critical of blacks who reject their roots, of the brothers and sisters too busy partying to see the problem. P.E.'s new album, Fear of a Black Planet, qualifies as dance music that is dense music: soul with a vengeance and the most challenging street art that rap has to offer.

Comedy. Stand-up comedy, once relegated to nightclubs and TV variety shows, is now big business. Its practitioners work comedy clubs, the concert circuit and cable TV, where their material is available to children. One way to get attention, to appear hip, to make a provocative point or just to give a joke some taboo oomph, is to talk dirty. Plenty of comics don't; the most popular TV comedian of the '80s is clean (and funny) Jay Leno. But plenty do. Just watch them on HBO or Showtime. Sam Kinison, a kind of defrocked evangelist of red-neck rage (and also, in spurts, funny), provoked the condemnation of gay spokesmen with his jokes about AIDS. On his new album, Leader of the Banned, Kinison declares that his motto is "family entertainment," then proceeds to put the knock on gays, Dr. Ruth, Jerry Lewis' "kids" and the worldwide female dictatorship. Family entertainment? Right: the Manson family.

Even on radio, where the most common four-letter vulgarisms are verboten, a host of popular "shock jocks" consider giving offense is Job One. Their humor is guy talk, kid division. The victims of their gags are familiar from the schoolyard: racial and sexual minorities, scheming females, body parts and bodily functions. A few years back, a D.C. radio host was censured for observing, on Martin Luther King Day, that "killing four more" would get + Americans the rest of the week off.

Jokes like these gave the FCC an excuse to muscle and perhaps muzzle the shock jocks, notably New York City's morning maven Howard Stern. Was Stern hurt by this notoriety? Not at all: his show is now aired also in Philadelphia and Washington. Turn him on, and odds are you can't gulp down your morning coffee before you hear him say "penis." Last year, in the guise of his comic superhero Fartman, he placed a call to Iran and mercilessly berated the poor Shi'ite who picked up the phone. Fans of shock-jock jokery highly prize this rude dude. Trouble is, anyone scanning the radio dial can accidentally alight on his malice. You can't put a lockbox on a radio.

Or on Andrew Dice Clay's mouth. A few years ago, Clay was playing small clubs and working as a supporting actor. Now he is poised between stand-up and stardom. He is top-lining in two summer movies, one a comedy concert film, the other a detective spoof called The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. With his suave prole looks and his studded, studied cock-of-the-Brooklyn-walk demeanor, Clay wears the aura of danger that Hollywood wants in a movie star. So maybe he'll be one. That still leaves doubts about his popular appeal.

In Clay's comedy, woman is only a sexual convenience, a sentimental slag, a "dishrag hoo-er." For him, all romantic encounters hover between mechanical sex and date rape. "So I say to the bitch, 'Lose the bra -- or I'll cut ya.' Is that a wrong attitude?" The obvious answer is yes. Nearly everything he says is wildly heinous. Clay knows this, and so do his fans; their laughter is a release at hearing forbidden thoughts twisted into jokes. Says Leonard R.N. Ashley, an English professor at Brooklyn College: "Because the seven dirty words are in now common usage, there are different standards. The new pornography is violence, often sexual violence. And the new obscenity is race. For most people, it's O.K. to call someone a bastard but not a nigger or a kike. But Clay is saying the taboo words we don't dare use. That's why he's popular. He's telling the secrets we keep inside us."

Clay spills his latest secrets on a double comedy album, The Day the Laughter Died, which, the warning label advises us, "contains filthy language and no jokes!!!" Talk about truth in advertising: in 100 minutes of banter there are not half a dozen good dirty jokes. Yet some of the loudest laughter comes from women. Good sports at their own immolation, they giggle and groan along with their beaux. Perhaps proving they are tough is as important to them as it is to men. Others have found the spectacle less edifying. One woman at Madison Square Garden listened to Clay's sluice of abuse and said she felt like a Jew at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Remember, she said, when pop culture was not naughty but nice?

Once there was a single official pop culture: white, middle class, mid-cult, status quo. Pretty much everybody hummed the same tunes, saw the same movies, laughed at the same genteel jokes. That changed in the '50s with rock 'n' roll. The new music took rhythm, danger and sexuality from the underground black culture, cranked the volume up, electrified it and handed it to a brand new consumer group: white teenagers. The young connoisseurs of metal and raunch are similarly adrift from the entertainment that amuses or moves today's adults.

So the mainstream is now two streams: one traditional and tranquil, the other torrential and caustic. To kids, the old culture looks hopelessly square, sounds like Muzak, tastes like cardboard. To parents, even those who grew up with Little Richard and Louie Louie, the new culture offers cause for alarm. Besides, how can they monitor what their kids are listening to without having to hear it themselves? "The price we pay for freedom of expression is that some things will be considered vile by some people," says Danny Goldberg, a manager of rock acts and chairman of the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Southern California. "But what's vile to a Mormon family in Utah is not vile to a black family in South Central Los Angeles."

The debate keeps coming back to language and race. Just as rhythm and blues helped create '50s rock 'n' roll, so does black slang contribute to the linguistic pungency of today's pop culture. As Brooklyn College's Ashley notes, "In the early years of the century, the tastemakers of our language were the English and Irish. Now taste is being defined by different groups. When times get tough for many people, they seek some outlet to give them a sense of freedom. This time, the rebellion is coming out in language." White soldiers in Vietnam picked up blacks' raw vocabulary, in which "m f" is routinely used as abuse or endearment, for emphasis or just filler. Richard Pryor proved that black anger and slang could find a large audience. Eddie Murphy, the top movie star of the '80s, turned the anguish into preening. In his concert film Raw and his period comedy Harlem Nights, Murphy had nothing new to say, so he said it dirty. It was raunch with no reason.

"They're trying to shock my generation," filmmaker John Waters says of the new crew, "by doing what we did to try to shock our parents' generation." Waters, who made his early rep with the scandalous comedy Pink Flamingos, makes a distinction between "good bad taste and bad bad taste. Good bad taste is always fueled by rage and anger with humor thrown in. Bad bad taste is fueled by stupidity and ignorance, and it comes out as anger." This is precisely what turns some liberal parents off about the new culture: not the language but the sneering attitude. Liberals are tolerant of everything but intolerance.

Whatever they do, they are unlikely to stop the spiral of taste from class to crass. For the history of 20th century art is the history of a flight from middle-class gentility. Two flights, really, in opposite directions, but from the same despised point of departure. High art moved toward abstraction and fragmentation and settled in the museums and concert halls. Popular art went the other way; it frolicked in the profane and did so on records and movie screens. High culture confused the middle class; pop culture shocked it. One culture was created by the intelligentsia, the other by the underclass, but both groups had the same goal: epater la bourgeoisie, which loosely translates as "gross out your parents." Your mamma can't dig modern dance, and your daddy can't rock 'n' roll. The movements were not so much revolutionary as rebellious. They proved their value and hipness by excluding the largest group of consumers: the middle-aged middle class.

And they created a huge new multibillion-dollar market -- of kids and the underclass -- to buy their product. Parents and other guardians of tradition are as concerned about the audience for X-rated pop as they are about the perpetrators. If pop weren't popular, fewer people would worry about its impact. No one has mounted a campaign against Randy Newman's songs about racial and sexual bigotry, for example, because Newman's audience is relatively small and well educated. The artful photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, some of which depict homosexual acts and sadomasochism, took a while to raise legal hackles because, after all, they were displayed in museums, where nice people have always looked at pictures of naked people.

"There's a tired old distinction that bright people will not be corrupted, | but that the working classes will," says Clive Barker, the English horror writer whose books have never been banned but whose films must be trimmed to get an R rating. "Therefore, television must be scrutinized more vigorously than pop music, pop music more than pop movies, pop movies more than art-house movies. Books needn't be watched at all. If people are reading, after all, they must be bright and won't be affected by all this stuff."

Maybe so, but even booksellers have come under fire. For months, the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, based in Tupelo, Miss., has campaigned to get stores to remove Playboy, Penthouse and similar magazines from their shelves. Last week the 1,300-store Waldenbooks chain, the nation's largest, launched a counterattack in the form of full-page ads in 32 U.S. newspapers, denouncing "censorship efforts" and "an increasing pattern of intolerance."

Books were hot stuff 30 years ago, when Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer broke censorship barriers and hit the best-seller lists. At the same time, Lenny Bruce set the four-letter standard for comics, and in the '70s Pryor and George Carlin brought it to the masses, where it belonged. Midnight Cowboy, which won an Oscar for best picture of 1969, was rated X, and so were other lauded films, such as Medium Cool, Performance and The Devils. Explicit lyrics have been in the pop mainstream since the late '60s; the Jefferson Airplane sang "Up against the wall, m f s," and they sang it on The Dick Cavett Show.

There are differences worth noting. Raw culture of the '60s was a political response to a system seen by many artists as repressive and, in Vietnam, genocidal. They championed the underdog by kicking the top dog. And for the first time, thanks to Supreme Court decisions liberalizing the definition of obscenity, performers were able to use whatever words they chose. Bruce, the gifted, tortured pioneer of this mode, aptly titled his autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. In the book's foreword, critic Kenneth Tynan praised Bruce as "an impromptu prose poet who trusted his audience so completely that he could talk in public no less outspokenly than he would talk in private." But Bruce suffered for that trust. His scabrous truth telling got him arrested in the U.S. and evicted from Britain. He died in 1966, perhaps the last American performer for whom notoriety was not a career move.

Lenny Bruce's triumph was posthumous, and maybe Pyrrhic: because of him, Andrew Dice Clay can make millions reciting dirty nursery rhymes in public. Clay and the other new raunch artists, most of them, are only incidentally subversive. They don't believe for a moment, most of them, what they're saying. Metal musicians are no serious Satanists; their concerts are just theater pieces -- Cats with a nasty yowl. Clay is not the pathetic strutting stud he seems onstage; that's just a character. (Was Jack Benny really stingy? Is Pee-wee Herman really a goony child?) Bruce said what he thought; Clay says what his character thinks. So Clay and other entertainers on the edge are playing out fantasies -- their own and their audience's -- of the baddest boy in school, of the kid your parents prayed to God you would never become.

In the wonderfully gross, fiercely moralistic movie Heathers, a nasty teen queen is asked, "Why are you such a megabitch?" Her answer: "Because I can be." Because of freedom of expression, comics and musicians can now be as nasty as they wanna be. And nasty is the word. In the erotic masterpieces of literature, sex was an expression of pleasure, and often of love, between equals. Today's sex talk, from Kinison and Clay and the 2 Live Crew, is almost exclusively from the male-pig viewpoint. A woman's role, their line goes, is only to serve and service a man.

The new comics' barbs at minorities are just as rank and rankling. But there is nothing novel about immigrant baiting in America. It flourished a century ago -- when humor directed at Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish newcomers was a music-hall staple -- and continued unabated in Hollywood's racially derisive treatment of blacks. The reason then was the same as it is today: people felt threatened by the outsiders and so made fun of them. In the new version, a raunch artist taps into the grudge a white working-class male may hold against the beneficiaries of affirmative action and liberal sympathy: minorities, the handicapped, gays. They get all the breaks, he figures; now what about me? His counterattack is to bad-mouth them with paranoid intensity. And that's where the sick threat and thrill come in.

But is this thrill a threat to the public weal? Since the traumas of the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam, many Americans have gradually closed off their minds to the nature of atrocity. They cope with the world's horror by numbing themselves to pain. They can shed tears over cute-tender stories of stranded whales or a baby in a well, but all too often everything else -- from a politician's promise to the Chernobyl disaster -- is so much show biz, ironized with shrugs and sick jokes. Today's children were bred in this atmosphere. With many of their parents past caring, how can the kids not be past shock?

Lisette, 13, a seventh-grader in Mamaroneck, N.Y., loves heavy metal and doesn't understand what all the fuss is about. Read her the lyrics to One in a Million, and she shrugs, "It's just a song." She loves Motley Crue's You're All I Need, but "Sometimes it's hard to understand the words because of the beat. And that's what I like about heavy metal bands. Besides, they're gorgeous! A lot of adults don't like them because when they're married and settled down, they don't think about having action or talking dirty. But teenagers do because of their sexual peak. If songs have curses in them, they're not going to bother kids. Everyone knows swear words by the third grade. My advice to parents is to let your kids grow up and do what they want to do." What burns Lisette is the idea that her music should be censored. "I wouldn't ban classical music," she says magnanimously.

Talk to a lot of kids Lisette's age; few will say they are harmed by rock. And few are, according to a study commissioned by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. Children do spend hours each day with music. But most prefer mainstream music, and whatever style they listen to, few are tempted by the siren call to excess. "Kids take it in stride," says Stanford University's Donald F. Roberts, who helped conduct the research. The survey should reassure parents that somehow their child will survive pop culture about as successfully as they did.

Perhaps today's youth is unshockable. And perhaps that fact should be shocking. "One of the things we all seek," says Clive Barker, "is the visionary experiences we had as children. We seem to have forgotten that those experiences are not soft and gentle, but often harsh and intense." For several American generations, a child's first entertainment experience was a Disney cartoon, with its wrenching traumas of betrayal, abandonment, a mother's death. An animated film could thrill a child to pieces or scare him near to death. And it introduced him to the beautiful and frightening banquet of popular culture.

That has always been the role of art: to shock, not just to ratify the prejudices of the generation in power. And no jolt is greater than the shock of the new. Original styles almost always look crude and excessive: Picasso's in painting ("My three-year-old could draw better!"), Brando's in acting ("He's got marbles in his mouth!"), Elvis' in music ("Photograph him from the waist up!"), Bruce's in comedy ("Book him!"). In their first outrageousness, these artists seemed to signal the end of the world; instead, they were heralding a new one. "A creator is not in advance of his generation," said Gertrude Stein, "but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation." Like them or not, today's blue comics and shock rockers know what is happening to this generation and are speaking to it. That is why they are popular.

And that is why, by any close reading of the law, X-rated pop deserves its First Amendment cloak. No one can predict whether, in a cool retrospective glance a decade or so from now, today's raunch will give evidence of artistic value. Odds are that, as in any group portrait, the members of the blue brigade will soon emerge as individuals, some gifted, some not. But because it speaks from the gut of disenfranchised America, and because it has raised the crucial issue of freedom of expression vs. public propriety, the form already has political value. And clearly, because of its popularity, it does not offend "contemporary community standards": a lot of the community is laughing and singing along.

Other Americans are outside picketing, agitating and getting agitated. That is, last time anyone checked, still the American way. You may despise the work of Clay or Mapplethorpe, Crue or the Crew, and still embrace the concept of an America that allows them to find or lose an audience. They have the right to offend; you have the right to be offended.

You can be excited by their work and still care about the future of children. You can mourn the fact that the end of innocence now arrives at about the age of reason -- that toxic pop culture, not just from entertainment but from school and home, from the news and the street, reaches young children. If you are a parent, you can take responsibility for steering them toward maturity. It's your job and nobody else's.

After that, you're on your own. Entertainers shouldn't have to act as baby- sitters or Sunday school teachers. And the government should quit playing hall monitor to blue comics, metal defectives, rap randies -- and the real artists among them who, through subtlety or obscenity, will help us navigate our trip into the 21st century.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles