On "HIStory Continues," fear has turned to aggression. The music has polarized; it's either clipped, choppy and electronic or glossy and sumptuous, only occasionally trying to combine the two. Most of the time, Jackson sounds as if he's singing through clenched teeth, spitting out words in defiance of any and all persecutors.

In the song called "HIStory," over a collage of vintage radio broadcasts (including the fall of the Berlin wall and the opening of Disneyland), Jackson tries to put a brave face on things. Harsh, clipped whispers spit out an individual's travails, a rising march asks, "How many children have to die?" and then a gospel chorus and children's voices preach, "Let's harmonize all around the world." But the song seems more obsessed with dying soldiers and "victims slaughtered in vain across the land" than with hope. The other social-conscience selection, "Earth Song," is a complaint to God about problems that range from war to endangered whales.

Most often, Jackson is on the defensive, and he has decided the best defense is a two-pronged counterattack. On the "Dangerous" album, he whined, "Why you wanna trip on me?" Now, he snarls accusations of his own. First, there's the Watergate defense: it's not him, it's the news media that are out to get him. In "Tabloid Junkie," he comes close to rapping: "Speculate to break the one you hate/ Circulate the lie you confiscate." He sings, "With your pen you torture me/ You'd crucify the Lord," and then, with harmony vocals akin to "Billie Jean," he tries to put across a catchy message: "Just because you read it in a magazine/ Or see it on a TV screen/ Don't make it factual."

The other defense shows up in "Childhood," and it's what might be called a Menendez brothers strategy: no matter what he did, he had an awful childhood that led him to it. Over tinkling keyboards and strings that could be sweeping across a Cinemascope panorama, he croons, "No one understands me." He adds, "They view it as such strange eccentricities, 'cause I keep kidding around." He invokes "the painful youth I've had," begs, "Try hard to love me" and, with a breaking voice, asks, "Have you seen my childhood?"

Jackson usually keeps his animosity general. The two-faced, money-grubbing people who besiege him stay unspecified -- "Somebody's out to get me" -- and he insists he'll tough it out: "I'm standin' though you're kickin' me." For listeners, those songs could rally any number of individual gripes. But Jackson reveals a more distorted personal perspective in "They Don't Care About Us." When he's not slinging the word kike, he calls himself "a victim of police brutality" and a "victim of hate" and insists that "if Roosevelt was livin', he wouldn't let this be," later substituting "Martin Luther" (King, presumbly) for Roosevelt. A listener might wonder just who "us" is supposed to be.

To make the songs lodge in the ear, Jackson uses elementary singsong melodies -- a "nyah, nyah" two-note motif in "They Don't Care About Us," a military-like chant in "2 Bad" -- and he comes up with all kinds of surprises in the arrangements. He's not above the obvious. "Scream," written with Janet Jackson and her producers, simply picks up the sound of Janet's "Rhythm Nation," and elsewhere on the album there are obligatory guest raps (from the Notorious B.I.G. and Shaquille O'Neal). But where Jackson used to sound treacly during his uptempo songs, he has now pared down the music. Choruses are sweeter than verses, but just enough to set them apart, and the rhythm tracks kick and twitch with brilliant syncopation. The ballads are lavishly melodic. "Stranger in Moscow," with odd lyrics like "Stalin's tomb won't let me be," has a gorgeous chorus for the repeated question "How does it feel?"