Witless, Banal Exercise From 2 Live Crew

Mix a little raunch with a bit of wit, as everybody from Cole Porter to Prince has done at some point, and you’ve got a formula for pop that’s lively, and maybe even healthily, artfully shocking.

Take away the wit, and turn the raunch into drooling pornography, and you’ve got the formula for the banal, embarrassing exercise that the 2 Live Crew perpetrated Saturday at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim. Imagine a bunch of smirking, priapicly fixated frat boys throwing a party where the entertainment is grainy stag films and the brainless bump and grind of nearly-naked female hirelings. There you have it, except that this Miami-based crew substituted its own cesspool rhymes for the nudie movies.

Some in the half-filled house stood with their arms folded, perhaps wondering whether they should feel a little ashamed, while others slurped it up like hooting refugees from Morton Downey Jr.’s studio audience. Truly, the less said about this tax on the First Amendment, the better. Lenny Bruce died for somebody’s sins, but not these.