Johnny B. Goody-Goody

On Feb. 1, Sinead O'Connor pulled out of Wednesday's Grammy Awards ceremony. "As artists," she reasoned, "I believe that our function is to express the feelings of the human race - always to speak the truth, and never to keep it hidden, even though we are operating in a world which does not like the sound of truth. I believe that our purpose is to inspire and in some way guide and heal the human race, of which we are all equal members." And that was just by way of clearing her throat.

In the past, such piety from a rock star might have seemed embarrassingly goody-goody. John Lennon may have declared the Beatles more popular than Jesus, but he never confused the two. But in 1991, piety - excessive, conspicuous piety - is rock's growth industry. From Don Henley to Phil Collins, from Sting to just about any rapper you'd care to name, pop stars are taking the weight of the world on their own padded shoulders and shooting it from arty angles in their videos. As Michael Hutchence of INXS puts it, "The people playing the music now are the upstanding citizens trying to save the world. And the straight businessmen are the evil guys."

Rebellion is out; fussy sanctimony is in. Natalie Merchant of the band 10,000 Maniacs professes to be more interested in nuclear-arms depots than in boys, and says of one of her songs, "I've taken upon myself the obligation of making a public plea to Central America for forgiveness for what has been done to their country." Central America, are you listening? The rapper Ice Cube, who spins grisly, vicariously exciting tales of urban homicide, holds himself righteously above his critics. He is, he says, "a hero - like Spiderman." Bono, messianic singer of U2, claims that even the fun element in rock is just a smoke screen for righteous do-goodism. "Partying," he has said, "is a disguise, isn't it?" Today's pop star is better suited to a PBS documentary series than to "American Gladiators."

For years, Sting was the undisputed leader of the pious posse: Sting, who wore body paint among the Kayapo people of the rain forest and nonprescription glasses among the North Americans, who said he would never appear in a movie that featured guns; who stipulated that his beer commercial run only in Japan; whose global concern could be measured in frequent-flier miles. But on his new album, "The Soul Cages," a bookish rumination on the death of his father, Sting retreats into more traditional, self-absorbed pretension.

In his absence from the pulpit, O'Connor has stepped up. Skating from one pious empty gesture to the next, she refused to appear on "Saturday Night Live" with Andrew Dice Clay last May and refused to sing at New Jersey's Garden State Arts Center last August if the national anthem was played before her concert. She is the good girl who says no. "If I were to win an award," she told the Grammy board, "I would feel it necessary to decline it in order to voice my rejection of the values which I think are destroying our work and which, I believe, are destroying the human race." O'Connor is definitely No. 1 with a flower.

But she's not alone on the hill. There are rock stars for peace, for the environment, for animals, for Walden Pond, for the Long Island fishermen, for hungry people and political prisoners across the globe. Even the cardboard boxes that new CDs come in bleed for our earth. A copy of the 2 Live Crew's flagrantly misogynous "Banned in the U.S.A." CD, for example, demurs "Car-pool when possible" as one of 10 "Action Steps for a Better Environment." These packages, or longboxes, added around 18 million pounds of waste to the environment last year.