Music: The Badder They Come

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But Jackson the singer can get bushwhacked by Jackson the persona, who is a ; dangerous highwayman. The Man in the Mirror most people will see is not the conscience-racked singer ("I'm starting with the man in the mirror/ I'm asking him to change his ways . . ./ If you wanna make the world a better place/ Take a look at yourself, and then make a change") but the Captain EO of theme-park fantasies or the peekaboo celebrity, recumbent in his isolation tank or cornered by paparazzi flashes, wearing his Elephant Man surgical mask and upping his bid for the remains of John Merrick.

Around Thriller's time, Jackson's weirdness was startling, peripheral, piquant. On Bad, lavishly produced by Quincy Jones and Jackson, it has become consuming. Thriller's songs were not strange in themselves. It was the presentation -- all those baroque, biting videos -- that gave them their eerie afterglow. Bad goes a whole step further. Now it's the songs that are crazy. Separately, they are innocuous enough, sentimental or feisty or scary as the mood demands. But together they form a pattern of jagged lines and long shadows that is troubling.

The material follows Thriller's golden trail. There is a Billie Jean equivalent (Dirty Diana) about a trashy romance. There are the ballads, deep as wall-to-wall pile, and there is the violent showpiece Smooth Criminal. The title track is Beat It redux, a spectacularly snazzy hang-tough tune that warns against macho excess. What the Thriller cut played for laughs, however, Smooth Criminal takes straight: an evocation of bloody assault, possible rape and likely murder. At any time, it would sound like a creepy song. At the end of the album, it has the effect of casting out all the optimism and willful idealism of Bad and Man in the Mirror and shrouding the record in a spooky, spiritual darkness. The piece is powerful, all right, but not perhaps in the way Jackson intended. It overpowers the joy of the playful competitiveness in his duet with peerless Stevie Wonder (Just Good Friends). It leavens the cosmic sentimentality of Another Part of Me well enough -- if E.T. had come to earth as a crooner, this would have been his My Way -- but does so with bile and fear.

Perhaps that was Jackson's goal, but the title of the last cut (available only on CD) indicates that he will not be taking questions on the subject. Leave Me Alone suggests he is turning away from everything, back again to the desperate comforts of his own impermeable world of fantasy. It is not a fond farewell. "It's the choice that we make/ And this choice you will take/ Who's laughin' baby." The credits for Smooth Criminal read in part "Michael Jackson's heartbeat recording by Dr. Eric Chevlen digitally processed on the Synclavier." The sound of Jackson's heart may have found its way onto Bad, but what's inside it is unrevealed. Only one thing is certain: there is no peace there.