Long before Janet Jackson bared her breast and before Eminem brought his media savvy rebellion to suburbs everywhere, 2 Live Crew burst into the mainstream, sitting – with stages full of strippers and Top 40 singles – atop the world of hip-hop.

Through crass lyrics and rapid 808 beats, they pushed the envelope, so to speak, shrouding what everyone knew were mediocre singles in a thick haze of controversy and sexual energy.

If nothing else, the media buzz helped them re-ignite a sexual revolution that had lain much subtler for two decades. In 1990, evangelizing attorney Jack Thompson took up a personal crusade that caught the attention of right-wingers everywhere and pushed the record into a spotlight the band could never have dreamed of otherwise.

Deflecting a small portion of the attention away from the East-West dichotomy South to Miami, the band was arrested for performing at a strip club. Countless fans know their third LP, “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” was ruled obscene in court.

They remained unapologetic, if not talented, artists.

And like many who receive such attention, they sold out huge venues – shows full of as many dancers and as much sex as was allowed by city ordinances. Their Yahoo! Launch music Web site notes that one album contained 87 oral sex references alone.

They wrote autobiographies, topped lists of public enemies and made people from Bruce Springsteen to Sinead O’Connor fancy them the revolutionaries who would test the obscenity laws and the public statutes that threaten musical freedom the country over.

So when the two elderly emcees and two young female dancers took the stage Monday night at the High Five, they couldn’t help but seem out of place. Playing a stage too small for most high school garage bands, the group looked naked – almost unrecognizable – without the in-your-face hype they had surrounded themselves with for the last 15 odd years.

Midway through the first song, the P.A. went out, and the emcees struggled to move the bewildered crowd by shouting into a dead microphone. Until “Me So Horny” came on several songs later, a group of kids sitting along a far wall struggled to figure out if the group of four was really 2 Live or just an opening act.

The songs were still heavy with fake drums and campy samples, but they are played over the club’s P.A. system. There is no DJ – only a hype man in the sound booth near the back calling out to the crowd of no more than 100.

After an emcee insisted that the group is taking the crowd back to the old school, the dance party started, where the girls in the “Me So Horny” T-shirts stripped down to their thongs and shook their asses over two men who sat in chairs on stage.

The crowd cheered a little, laughed a lot, and the scene recalled a spoof in The Onion where an aging Marilyn Manson goes door-to-door in suburban neighborhoods trying to shock the people who no longer buy his albums.

The songs, even those as purposely crass as “F— Shop,” could once have been deemed creative – 2 Live used melodies that everyone already knew to introduce people to sexual politics that no one publicly acknowledged. Now, they seemed powerless and juvenile, indicative of how unappealing the group is without the national media circus that drove its career.

Near the stage, people laughed and sipped their drinks, craning their heads to see the girls who came to the stage and undressed. A kid wearing a FUBU jersey and wire-frame glasses moved to the stage, took a picture with his cell phone and returned to the bar to order another drink.