BABY, REMEMBER MY NAME.(Taboo)(Fame on 42nd Street)(Theater Review)

Like a number of pop artists who have attained lasting notoriety, the British singer and spectacle Boy George has a canny understanding of the needs, hopes, and dreams of his audience. In Culture Club, the rock group that made him a household name back in the early eighties, he married the sound of black nostalgia--Motown, ska, and a little reggae--to a distinctly white representation of visual difference. His look--a kind of errant Hasidism mixed with a feminized Rastafarianism--was an advertisement not only for his strikingly amphibious self but also for world music, which was just coming into vogue. In fact, what he was putting over was the entire history of English ...