Sir Mix A Lot

Will.i.am Songs About Girls (Interscope) * * 1/2 Will.i.am might be the only pop artist who can make comparing a woman to a farm animal seem like nice, clean fun. The Black Eyed Peas' idea man exudes frantic goodwill, even when he's cramming his productions with unsubtle hooks and tricks or building party anthems around the most juvenile rhymes since the members of Kriss Kross hung up their backward coats.

INDIO - Just a few hours into the annual three-day country-music jamboree Stagecoach, Nashville veteran Connie Smith introduced what she described as "one of my favorite country-gospel songs. " The small but attentive Friday afternoon crowd listened as she sang "Peace in the Valley," a song popularized in the '50s by Red Foley. She struck a tone of steadfast piety as she declared, "There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble I see. " The line felt like a bulwark against the gloom that might've settled in at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival after the death Friday morning of the great country singer George Jones.

Record industry veteran Mike Bone, who was sued last year for sexual harassment by a female assistant at Island Records, started work Monday as a sales and marketing executive at Def American Records, a Time Warner subsidiary. Reaction to the hiring in the music industry was mixed. Heidi Robinson, head of media relations at Burbank-based Def American, confirmed reports that several of the company's 12 female employees objected to working with Bone and voiced their opposition to management.

If you subject yourself to much music video programming, you may have found yourself lately with a confusing case of double vision. Ingested beyond the recommended dose, MTV has been known to produce bizarre hallucinatory effects, but this time your mind isn't going. In several recent instances, two--or even three--completely different videos have been made to promote one hit song.

In spite of the Grammy show's stellar live performance lineup, the behind-the-scenes antics of the Red Hot Chili Peppers made for some of the night's best entertainment.

Oozing charisma in a tiger-striped tuxedo and armed with a repertoire longer than the Las Vegas Strip, Richard Cheese might be the most ironic tribute act on the planet. Cheese, a.k.a. singer/comedian Mark Davis of Studio City, and his band Lounge Against the Machine rearrange Top 40 radio hits into swanked-up covers reminiscent of Bill Murray's Nick Winters persona on "Saturday Night Live."

Great pop music is inspiring, irreverent, goofy, disarming, obsessive, silky, quirky, seductive, witty and mysterious--and there's at least one of those qualities in every record in this salute to the most engaging singles so far in 1992. U2's "One" tops the list because it embraces the most important of those characteristics.

Here are the premiere schedules of WB Network and United Paramount Network. Spot any Top 10 contenders? WB Network (KTLA-TV Channel 5, KTTY-TV Channel 69 in San Diego, cable superstation WGN) * "The Wayans Bros": The Wayans brothers just keep on coming. This time it's Shawn and Marlon starring as brothers in a high-energy sitcom with loads of camera mugging and physical gags--in the vein of "I Love Lucy," promises the WB Network press kit. So, which one's Lucy? (Wednesdays at 8 p.m.

It's not exactly the highest-rated show on Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" block. It airs at such a wee hour, even its creators admit they don't stay up to watch it. And its visual style is so unusual that purists say it doesn't even qualify as animation. But "Tom Goes to the Mayor," one of the most inventive shows on a channel that prides itself on unusual late-night programming, returns for a second season late Sunday night (actually 12:30 a.m.

The 20th annual American Music Awards ceremony was so tame Monday night at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium that the press was thankful for its old nemesis: Michael Bolton. Bolton, who urged critics at last year's American Music Awards to seek out psychotherapy because of what he termed their "nasty, negative" comments in reviews of his music, smiled after winning one of his two awards and told reporters, "Success is the best revenge."