COMMENTARY : RODMAN PUTS HIS OWN SPIN ON CULTURE.

Byline: Margo Jefferson The New York Times

Now that America is no longer in the forefront when it comes to industrial and mechanical invention, its job is to produce new cultural types. Today, this is being done largely on the popular culture front. It is here that performers splice myths and roles together in what we might call feats of stylistic engineering.

On these grounds, Chicago Bulls forward Dennis Rodman has made a genuine contribution to popular culture, and there must be many people across the nation who fervently hope he will get his act together by getting control of his more unruly impulses on the basketball court.

In the latest incident, he kicked a cameraman during a basketball game. Male athletes, rock stars and celebrities are regularly observed and occasionally punished for attacking photographers, fans, fellow players, umpires, referees and women in bars, cars and hotel rooms.

Few of them are reprimanded quite as sternly or smugly as Rodman has been. They are called brats and bullies; once in a while they are called rapists. Rodman has been called a brat and a bully for years now. But only since he began talking about bisexuality and dressing up in campy costumes, only since his book, ``Bad as I Wanna Be,'' came out in 1996, only since then, have people been predicting imminent nervous breakdowns or tossing around words like ``psychopath.''

What ``Bad as I Wanna Be'' really shows is that Dennis Rodman is squarely in the American tradition of the aggressive class clown and cutup. This is a role also being played by other canny, nerve-racking performers like Howard Stern and Roseanne.

But would there be so many armchair psychiatrists if Rodman's on-court bullying weren't accompanied by all that off-court cross-dressing and bisexual teasing (those transgressive acts of gender-bending, as academics like to say)?

Athletes still carry the culture's dreams of mega-masculinity on their game-ready, gym-worked shoulders. As an athlete, Rodman totes his share of this load. But as a celebrity, a pop culture star, he gets away with a lot of sexual nose-thumbing: yes, he talks (and talks) about his affairs with women, but he also talks about being attracted to men and about the eros that can fill the most heterosexual locker rooms; he does pinup-boy photography spreads for magazines, kisses RuPaul on television and is interviewed in the gay journal The Advocate.

In choosing his wardrobe, Rodman gives a fresh spin to the classic modernist dictum that form must follow function. For sports-linked interviews or mainstream talk shows like Jay Leno's, where the host and guest are like the leading men in a buddy film, he dons strict guy garb: T-shirts and sensible shoes.

And hats too - not just the all-American baseball cap but the leather cap, the full-crowned apple cap and the fake fur Stetson: a walking history of headgear for the African-American street man.

For more spectacular artistic events (music award shows, book signings) he chooses a Las Vegas showgirl look: that's when we see the leather skirts or short-shorts, the wafer-thin sleeveless shirts (flagrantly displayed pectorals do for men what cleavage does for women), the boas and the voluminous bridal gown.