Music: The Badder They Come

There is just no getting away from Bad. Even before its official release date on Aug. 31, there were plentiful rumors and heavyweight expectations about Michael Jackson's first solo record in five years. Among other things, the new album had to meet and match his 1982 Thriller, which sold an unprecedented 38.5 million copies around the world and made him into a pop-culture phenomenon, part dancing phantom and part homeboy Kewpie. Bad's first single, a bonbon called I Just Can't Stop Loving You, was a perfect love ballad for parlous times: sexy but hygienic, passionate but never lustful. Radio programmers grumbled at Epic's choice of a low-profile make-out tune for the album's first single. None of this got in the way of the song, however: it is now No. 2 on the Billboard chart.

Bad, which contains nine other tunes besides I Just Can't Stop Loving You (or ten, counting a bonus tune on the CD), further compounds the confusion. Like some fine-tuned racing car, it kicks up a lot of its own dust. The album's first video, a stinging 16-minute dramatic vamp on the title tune directed by Martin Scorsese, premiered in prime time on CBS last week and grabbed a 30 share. Set in a New York City subway station, it was in part inspired by the life of Edmund Perry, a gifted black graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy whose violent death revealed a troubled double existence. Folks who found the Bad video too tough may be soothed by next year's Smooth Criminal. This multimillion-dollar minifilm has slam-bang special effects supervised by Colin Chilvers, who worked on the first three Superman films.

During all this blitz, Jackson was in heavy rehearsal for what is expected to be a yearlong concert tour, beginning in Tokyo on Sept. 12; it is his first show since his 1984 tour with his brothers. A triumph seems assured: the box office was cleaned out in 7 1/2 hours, and $45 seats were soon on the black market for $775. After years of antic hibernation, Michael Jackson, now 29, is again ready for the world. Is the world ready for Michael Jackson? It has no choice.

Not initially, anyhow. The record business is primed for another monster hit. The great pop-culture dream machine needs the kind of lube job only an icon like Jackson can deliver. With advance orders of 2 million, there will be a lot of Bad around, and it is useless to resist.

What is there to be heard is a state-of-the-art dance record. Jackson's lyrics combine sometimes glancing felicity ("Your talk is cheap/ You're not a man/ You're throwin' stones/ To hide your hands") with scat-style facility. There is a great singer at work here, doing vocal stunts on tracks like Dirty Diana or Speed Demon that are as nimble and fanciful as any of his dance steps. Man in the Mirror, a ballad of confession and resolution, is more than just a vocal turn. It is a remarkable dramatic performance -- intense, direct and unadorned, one of the best things Jackson has ever done.