Above the Law Is Happy to Take the Rap for ‘Murder’ : Pop: Their rude, crude debut single is No. 2 on the chart after only a month. The South-Central L.A. group headlines tonight in Anaheim.

“Murder Rap” is a cold slap in the face amid the bouncy hip-hop on KDAY-AM: a shriek of synthesized siren, a single piano bass note, a nervous drum beat that twitches like a sweaty trigger finger on a stolen AK-47.

Over this, a rapper who calls himself Cold-187um, after the police code for homicide, says “Now I’ve got a murder rap” over and over in a flat, dusky tenor remarkably similar to that of former N.W.A member Ice Cube.

However, there is none of the merry banter that underlies an N.W.A song, none of Public Enemy’s grace, none of Ice-T’s gift for metaphor. “Murder Rap” is possibly the crudest song ever to reach heavy radio rotation.

After only a month, this debut single from South-Central L.A. rap posse Above the Law is No. 2 on the Billboard magazine rap chart. And the group’s “Livin’ Like Hustlers” had an initial shipment of 150,000, impressive for a first album. They’ve sold 140,000 of these in the first week, and the group headlines Anaheim’s Celebrity Theatre tonight.

The four members of Above the Law, the newest hard-core rappers in the platinum stable of Compton-based producer Dr. Dre, glowered in the plush Hollywood suite of their publicist.

In the crowded category of hard rap, ATL is the hardest. Take the gangster mystique cultivated by N.W.A’s Ice Cube, who recently went out on his own.

“Ice Cube, how’s he going to write about something he’s never been through?” asked Go-Mack, one of the group’s two deejays. (ATL’s KM.G, a rapper, and deejay K-Oss remained mute through the interview.)

“Ice Cube had a good house, he had both a mother and father with him, he got bused to a good school. . . . The only rowdy people he knew was us. He was writing about us. What you hear on N.W.A’s album, we was in it while he was only writin’ about it.”

When informed of Go-Mack’s comments, Ice Cube quipped: “New jacks (poseurs) from Pomona should only talk about the 10 Freeway.”

“We wasn’t gangsters,” 187um said, “we was hustlers. Gangsters are ruthless killers; hustlers use whatever means necessary, get busy if we have to. Whatever you can think of that went down in South-Central, we was part of it. The whole nine yards.”

Obviously, ATL has little sympathy for the currently popular “positive rap” movement led by Boogie Down Productions’ KRS-One. “We don’t want to be hypocrites,” 187um said. “We want to talk about what we’ve been through and who we are. We had to get away from the basic rap style, talking about peace, love and dancing. Our generation shot out with the drugs, the gang bangin’, the whole nine. It would be fake for us to go out and tell people to stop the violence.”

“Don’t get us wrong, all of us--N.W.A too--are aware of who we are and where we come from. We’re just talking about what’s going down, not peace, peace, peace all the time.”

Go-Mack and 187um grew up in Pomona and hung out in the South-Central rap clubs.

They formed the current version of Above the Law at the suggestion of Go-Mack’s cousin LayLaw, a member of the N.W.A entourage. Many people still think of ATL as the little brothers of N.W.A.

“But we want to be known because we’re Above the Law,” 187um said, “not because we’re down with N.W.A.”

“We was above the law, livin’ like hustlers,” Go-Mack said. “We used to be street hustlers. Now we media hustlers instead.”