OLDER BUT NOT WISER

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Nostalgia comes quickly in the '90s. We watch VH1's The Big '80s and laugh at the silly videos we thought were so cool only about seven years back; we yearn for the funnier, fresher David Letterman of, oh, about a year or so ago; perhaps some of us are already feeling misty-eyed in the wake of ABC's announcement last week that Daniel Benzali--who helped make baldness telegenic--will be departing from Murder One next season.

In any case, some veteran musicians who haven't released albums in half a decade or longer may be poised to benefit from the current backward-gazing climate. These would include dance-pop butt wiggler turned contract-breaking auteur George Michael; gentlemanly crooner and former Commodore Lionel Richie, and punk poet Patti Smith. The trio have been lying low for reasons ranging from contract disputes (Michael) to personal problems (Richie went through a divorce in his time off, and his father passed away; during Smith's hiatus, her husband died). Normally, long-term hibernation isn't healthy for pop musicians. But who says only movie stars can make Travoltaesque comebacks?

Unfortunately, none of the albums under consideration here are very good. In particular, Michael's new CD, Older, is hypocritical and dreary. The singer has been rebelling against his teenybopper past as co-leader of Wham! for some time now (his last album, which attempted a more serious tone, was titled Listen Without Prejudice Vol. I), but on this new CD he is not only a rebel without a cause, he also lacks energy and wit. On the song Star People he actually sings "Star People/ counting your money till your soul turns green/ Star people/ counting the cost of your desire to be seen...How much is enough?" This from the man who pouted and pouted and demanded to be let out of his Sony contract and later snapped up a $52 million deal with DreamWorks? This from a man who wrote these lyrics for his 1987 hit single I Want Your Sex: "Sex with me/ Have sex with me/ C-c-c-c-come on." Now he's the high priest of piousness? C-c-c-c-come on.

An even bigger offense: Michael's album is just plain boring. None of the songs move much faster than a beverage cart down the cramped aisle of a passenger airplane. Faith, Michael's first solo album, was appealing partly because he seemed to be working so hard to entertain us--songs like Hard Day featured sweaty, muscular dance rhythms; ballads like One More Try had amusingly earnest vocals. Michael's new songs are too concerned with seriousness and maturity to break a sweat. In his attempt to make music that's restrained, adult and timeless, he's instead crafted songs that seem exhausted and out of date. Listeners looking for laid-back pop-soul that smolders, intrigues and seems thoroughly contemporary should check out Everything but the Girl's supple new CD, Walking Wounded.

Michael isn't alone in apparently equating slowness with wisdom. Richie's first new album in 10 years is also a rather slumberous affair, one whose title, Louder than Words, belies its content. This is a soft, quiet album. The first song, Piece of Love, does have a deep, engaging bass groove, but few moments on this CD--except the wonderful cascade of jazz that closes out the song Lovers at First Sight--really hook us. The talented Richie can do more--remember Easy and Three Times a Lady? Those songs were slow too, but they had a casual charm Richie's new material could use more of.

The biggest disappointment in this crop of albums is Patti Smith's. In the '70s, with such albums as Horses, she merged insurgent, thoughtful poetry with heartfelt and jagged-edged rock 'n' roll. She's never been much of a vocalist--she has a croaky, flat voice--but the strength of her music came from what she was singing, not how she was singing it. Unfortunately, on her new album, Gone Again, words fail her. The album deals with issues of mortality (the word heaven pops up in three songs), but the endeavor is marred by one song, Summer Cannibals, which comes complete with faux tribal chants and stereotypical images galore (boiling cauldrons and the like) along with a guttural, chanted chorus, "eat/eat/eat."

As someone with a reputation as a wordsmith, as one of the founders of punk, as a veteran artist who has had eight years to think about what she wanted to say, Smith should have been able to come up with something better than a cartoony, colonial-era take on cannibalism as a metaphor for issues of survival. Listening to such painfully out-of-touch music from Smith, as well as these other pop standouts from the past, is enough to cure the worst case of nostalgia.