Rock Turns Mean And Ugly

``As Nasty as They Wanna Be,`` an album by the Miami rap group 2 Live Crew, has become a national cause celebre because of its violent sex imagery and profanity. While still unresolved debates simmer in the nation`s courtrooms centering on 2 Live Crew`s right to free speech and a community`s right to suppress what it perceives to be obscene, the record has piled up more than 2 million in sales.

But ``As Nasty as They Wanna Be`` is hardly an isolated aberration, nor is it the most virulent or shocking form of rap or rock to become popular in recent months.

A current song by the Houston rap group the Geto Boys, ``Mind of a Lunatic,`` makes ``As Nasty as They Wanna Be`` sound tame:

``Put him in a straitjacket, the man`s sick/This is what goes on in the mind of a lunatic/Looking through a window now my body is warm/She`s naked, and I`m a peeping Tom/Her body`s beautiful so I`m thinking rape/Shouldn`t have had her curtains open, so that`s her fate.``

The song goes on in gruesome and explicit detail to describe sexual and violent acts against the woman`s body and ends with the attacker scrawling his name on the wall, Charlie Manson-style.

Without major-label support or radio airplay, the Geto Boys` recent album ``Grip It! On That Other Level`` sold more than 500,000 copies and cracked the Billboard Top 30 earlier this year.

Last August, a Terre Haute, Ind., CD plant refused to manufacture the Geto Boys` self-titled follow-up on Def American Records. Then its

distributor, Geffen Records, refused to release it, saying the record

``glamorizes and possibly endorses violence, racism and misogyny.``

Finally, the Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Corp. agreed to distribute the record, and it has already sold 200,000 copies with virtually no radio airplay.

An album by the California rapper Ice Cube, formerly of the group N.W.A.

(Niggers With Attitude), has topped 1 million in sales with a series of raps that refer to women as either ``hoes`` or ``bitches.``

In one of its most notorious songs, ``You Can`t Fade Me,`` Ice Cube plots various ways to commit an abortion on a prostitute who has informed him she`s carrying his baby.

Although Ice Cube and the Geto Boys are unsurpassed in their explicit misogyny, a host of hard-rock bands has for years been dealing in sexist euphemisms that are just as degrading. So as not to be banned on radio like their rap counterparts, bands such as Motley Crue, Warrant, Scorpions, Skid Row and Aerosmith routinely use transparent code words to describe their one- sided lust affairs. For example, Motley Crue demands a ``Slice of Your Pie`` on their recent No. 1 album, ``Dr. Feelgood.``

In their videos, many of these bands don`t bother to hide their misogyny behind irony or double entendres. Scorpions` 1984 song ``Rock You Like a Hurricane`` cracked the top 30, thanks in large part to frequent airing of its video, which featured chained, scantily clad women in cages.

These demeaning visuals aren`t limited to videos. The back cover of Warrant`s Top 10 ``Cherry Pie`` album features a man smugly enjoying a woman`s sexual ministrations.

Other groups trade in matters of the flesh of a different sort. Explicit depictions of torture, violent death and maggot-ridden decay are the stock in trade of a host of underground ``death metal`` bands such as Deicide, Violence, Annihilator, Obituary and Slayer.

Popular industrial dance bands such as Chicago`s Ministry express a hatred for life itself, finding corruption, pain and hypocrisy in everything that moves on such aptly titled albums as ``Land of Rape and Honey.``

Racism and homophobia, once the stock in trade of underground hate groups such as Fear, also are entering the mainstream. ``One in a Million,`` by the multimillion-selling group Guns N` Roses, is perhaps the most notorious example, with singer Axl Rose sneering his intolerance of blacks and homosexuals, using far less polite words to categorize them. And though few rap groups are as fixated on gay-bashing as they are on misogyny, crude references to homosexuals pepper the music of Audio Two and Ice-T, among others.

A healthy contempt for authority and propriety has always fired rock music. What were wild-eyed Little Richard and swivel-hipped Elvis Presley if not symbols of adolescent rebellion and flaming lust? But because the majority of rock `n` roll is made and marketed by men, its obsession with sex is frequently sexist.

Perhaps the most notorious and well-known exponent of rock as misogyny has been the Rolling Stones, beginning with `60s songs such as ``Under My Thumb`` and ``Stupid Girl.`` The Beatles also did their share of women-bashing, most notably in the song ``Run For Your Life,`` in which John Lennon sang ``I`d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.``