That would be dread.

Michael Jackson's greatest hits-his HIStory -reek of it. As ebullient and vibrant as the performances powering the likes of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," "Beat It," "Billie Jean" and "Bad" absolutely are, the singer is in a constant, convulsive state of panic, flinching, wincing and cowering away from the vaguest notions of intimacy or confrontation. But now Mr. Jackson does not flinch alone. The first of a torrent of wry couplets scattered throughout This Is Hardcore goes: "This is our 'Music From a Bachelor's Den'-the sound of loneliness turned up to 10." That song, "The Fear," is a claustrophobic panic attack whose narrator is endlessly assailed by unbidden epiphanies of his own solitude, his hollow existence and the conclusion of his own mortality. "The Fear" makes a promise that the rest of This Is Hardcore more than lives up to.

In Pulp's last album, Different Class , Mr. Cocker's persona was that of a snide, lustful, revenge-obsessed misfit who staunchly sided with the oppressed. That album made him, in Britain at least, a star, and this album is a horrified reaction to that stardom. In a classic don't-wish-too-hard, you-might-get-what-you-want scenario, Jarvis Cocker, after 16 years of rejection and derision, finally became a man in tune with his times. Unfortunately, man is the operative word. When all the other leading luminaries of mid-90's British pop hadn't quite lost that flush of youth, the members of Pulp were all in their 30's. Belatedly allowed access to the V.I.P. suite, Jarvis Cocker was too jaundiced, too knowing and experienced to exult in his success and indulge his appetites with the same enthusiasm and idiocy of his new chart colleagues.

Britain is afflicted with more than its fair share of guys who never grew up and out of their love of collecting color vinyl singles and collating chart positions. These guys run and read their own magazine, the phenomenally successful thirtysomething pop paper, Q . They have a novel affectionately satirizing their foibles: Nick Hornby's High Fidelity . There's even a popular BBC-TV game show called Never Mind the

Buzzcocks , wherein stand-up comics, actors and musicians of a certain age answer trivia

questions about Angelic

Upstarts B-sides.

The thought that he is of this species revolts and horrifies Mr. Cocker. But how does a quirky pop star no longer disposed to indiscriminate snorting and screwing approach the looming prospect of middle age without coming off like the high school teacher ridiculed by his charges for attempting to appear au courant ? Mr. Cocker voices his dilemma on the spine-chilling "Help the Aged," in which he wearily mutters, "Help the aged, one time they were just like you, drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue."

Early middle age malaise is not the only source of Mr. Cocker's epic funk. The array of willing flesh available to him since his ascendancy to domestic folk hero status has proved to be the source of more misery. The record's title track baldly equates a routine coupling with a porn auteur choreographing a cum shot. On the epic "Seductive Barry," Mr. Cocker participates in a mating dance with Neneh Cherry, each mouthing standard-issue R&B slow jam clichés-"Here in the night love takes control. Making me high, making me whole"-and making them seem like slurs. The singer is equally pitiless when he shifts the spotlight away from his own numerous shortcomings. On "A Little Soul," which references Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Tracks of My Tears," Mr. Cocker etches a portrait of a regretful abusive father sending out an S.O.S. to stop his son from following in his footsteps ("You look like me but please don't turn out like me").

Glam rockish where its predecessor glinted with a New Wave sheen, This Is Hardcore makes plain its debts to David Bowie, Roxy Music and Mott the Hoople. In fact, the latter outfit's lead singer, Ian Hunter, himself a neuroses-filled late-in-life pop star, produced a precursor of "The Fear" two decades earlier in "Through the Looking Glass," in which he moaned, "Why do you have to paint teeth green when they're snowy, white and clean?"

If Mr. Cocker's lyrical facility has evolved between albums, the group has taken something of a hit musically. This is due to the departure of longtime music director Russell Senior. His absence hasn't resulted in the talent amputation of a Johnny Marr-less Morrissey, but it certainly means that, hookwise, Different Class lords its way over its successor, many of whose arrangements aim for atmospheric and end up turgid.

The only song that comes close to emulating the last album's wily juxtaposition of brazen pop and waspish observations is the album closer, "Like a Friend." Written for the Great Expectations soundtrack, it's a you-only-hate-the-ones-you-love case study with Mr. Cocker intoning, "You are the cut that makes me hide my face/ You are the party that makes me feel my age." The video for the song was recently submitted for approval on 12 Angry Viewers , MTV's real-life Beavis and Butt-head , in which a panel of adolescent arbiters applauds or castigates new releases. The intercutting between the perfect commingling of Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke, and Jarvis' derisive delivery, was already ironic. But the show deepened the wounds, simultaneously showing Jarvis' comment on the movie and the 12 angry viewers' grossed-out nausea at the sight of the singer and his famously geeky disco dance. For Mr. Cocker, there's no growing old gracefully.

Though her career decline was in no way as steep as the aforementioned artists, Madonna's enduring role as liberator of the national libido rendered her increasingly wearisome. But just as her public perception was becoming similar to Mrs. Dinsmoor, the potty-mouthed, couture-clad, batty old hag Anne Bancroft portrays in the recent remake of Great Expectations , three events halted Madonna World from becoming the least patronized peep show on the block. (1) She had a baby. (2) She was hit by the epiphany that she was not, in fact, the center of the universe. (3) She was seized by the urge to make electronic-based dance music as challenging, visceral and uncompromising as records she was hearing by Tricky, Goldie and her Maverick employees, the Prodigy.

Luckily, she was entirely unsuccessful with (3). Tricky, Goldie and the Prodigy laughingly turned down or ignored her requests for collaboration. She turned instead to long-serving British ambient noodler and remixer William Orbit, who became her partner in something Madonna has never before experienced: a marriage made in Heaven. Tricky, Goldie and the lads from the Prodigy would have considered it their duty to mess with mass audience expectations. They would, no doubt, have persuaded her to warble, shriek and moan over pounding, distorted rhythm tracks and grinding industrial samples. And she'd have called them geniuses for it. William Orbit, on the other hand, has constructed some beautiful, shimmering music over which Madonna sings in a lush, expressive voice developed, ironically, through the rigors of grappling with Andrew Lloyd Webber's sucky score for Evita .

Appropriately for an album soaked in themes of spiritual salvation, Ray of Light (Maverick-Warner Brothers) has entirely redeemed Madonna's shaky reputation. Her newly minted public face-that of the dewy-fresh, Sanskrit-literate, cabala-conversant, om-ing New Age nurturer-may turn out to be no more sincere than a longtime World Wrestling Federation contender's sudden conversion to the upstart New World Order. But it's much more in tandem with the times.

This year's Madonna has gone from sneering "I'm not your bitch, don't hang your shit on me"-the lovely refrain of "Human Nature" from her previous album, Bedtime Stories -to intoning reverently, "I worship the guru's lotus feet, awakening the happiness of the self revealed," on the dance floor mantra "Shanti Ashtangi." The empire builder who once ground out the spirits of ex-lovers like so many cigarette butts now displays vulnerability and regret for public consumption. "I traded love for fame without a second thought," she muses on the opening "Drowned World-Substitute for Love," and elsewhere she ruminates on fear of solitude, feelings of emptiness and the dead end that is life in the fast lane.

Whenever an artist of stature gets to cleansing his or her soul in such a manner, the only appropriate response is: so what? But William Orbit's delicately assembled electronic backwash and Madonna's finely tuned ear for a hook quash any such envy-inspired insensitivity. If she'd attempted to wax confessional in a style redolent of Alanis Morissette, Madonna would, I guarantee, have been a goner. Instead, the record soars.

As rich as much of Mr. Orbit's musical contribution to Ray of Light is, what lifts the record effortlessly above the rest of Madonna's output in the 1990's is that, rather than being any kind of great leap forward, it actually harks back to her finest-ever album, 1989's Like a Prayer . Back from that era is her most melodically gifted collaborator, Patrick Leonard, who co-writes a few songs here, including both the epic goth single "Frozen" and "Sky Fits Heaven," which lifts its hook from Like a Prayer 's busted marriage post-mortem, "Till Death Us Do Part." Back, too, is her exploration of religious ecstasy. But when she sang "It feels like home" on the hit single "Like a Prayer," she was clinging to Catholicism. When she sings "I feel like I just got home" on "Ray of Light" … uh, I'm guessing she's talking about the dispersion of her energy throughout the metaphysical universe.

She's also still dwelling on the death of her mother on "Mer Girl," a video-game-like narrative which finds Madonna running through endless obstacles until she reaches an open grave and then "I smelt her burning flesh, her rotting bones, her decay." While Like a Prayer contained a lullaby, "Dear Jessie," written for Patrick Leonard's offspring, she coos "Little Star" to her own much-publicized progeny. When you hear Madonna sigh, "God gave a present to me made of flesh and bones," it's almost like the whole Sex book thing never happened.

Not only is Ray of Light an object lesson in image resuscitation, it also has the potential to be a life-changing record. Specifically, it will change the lives of every lunkheaded alternative-rock outfit staring at the imminent failure of their sophomore album, as well as every tune-free electronic act signed in the electronica feeding frenzy. After a cursory listen to the ecstatic title track of Ray of Light , in which limpid indie-angst guitars jockey for position with burbling keyboards, and Madonna gives the most abandoned song-reading she's ever committed to record, every A&R guy in the country is going to be rushing for the nearest cellular phone. The rock groups are going to be ordered to plug in some synthesizers, and the electro outfits are going to have to enlist girl singers. By that time, of course, Madonna will have moved on to something else. As long as it's not Lourdes' first single, I think we're on safe ground.

However, the urge to stretch has been conspicuous by its absence in the 1990's. As attention deficit disorder reaches epidemic proportions-start preparing eulogies for last year's ska-punk winners-few artists have the luxury to indulge themselves in a Tusk , a Sandinista! or a Secret Life of Plants . The rule book on risk-taking in the 90's was written by U2: reinvent yourself into the Ringling Brothers but never forget your sweeping stadium ballads. Probably the only big act to challenge the preconceptions of an established constituency was the Stone Roses, whose long-aborning 1995 blues odyssey, Second Coming , jettisoned all of their characteristic hooks and harmonies. But while Second Coming was a dispiriting dud, it was not so much an example of egregious indulgence as what happens when you smoke too much hashish and lock yourself in a recording studio in Wales for months. For a hall of fame specimen of Artistic Overreach, the spotlight falls on Saturnz Return (London), the new double-CD by jungle gent Goldie. As its title suggests, it's on a whole other planet.

Music scribblers enamored of the oppressive, clattering dance genre known since 1992 as either jungle or drum 'n' bass had plenty of ammunition for their screeds. They could write about the disaffection felt by black Britons for the saturation of Acid House and its airplane hangars full of grinning, Ecstasy-addled, touchy-feely, whistle-blowing acolytes. They could write about jungle's intricate drum patterns, subterranean bass belches and hurtling velocity as music that mirrored the paranoia and claustrophobia of the inner cities. They could write that this was desperate music for desperate times, that the mere act of dancing to this frenetic din was, in and of itself, an act of survival.

But that kind of thing only goes so far without a larger-than-life linchpin figure to humanize the music. They don't come much larger than life than Clifford Price, a.k.a. Goldie. Big, black and blonde, this British B-boy has, in his 32 years, been a petty criminal, a break dancer, a graffiti artist, a manufacturer of customized gold tooth caps (he sports a gleaming mouthful of the product, hence the moniker), an intimate companion of Björk and, at press time, Naomi Campbell. His debut double CD, 1995's Timeless , was the first piece of compelling evidence that jungle could live and breathe outside the dance floor and beyond the parameters of compilation albums.

Mixing R&B-tinged vocals, long, hallucinatory keyboard swells and beats that sounded like arbitrarily hurled firecrackers, Goldie spawned a race of armchair junglists. But that race bowed down to a fresh figurehead in 1997 with the advent of Roni Size's New Forms. The Bristol collective's ability to mesh double bass, acoustic guitar, horns and an actual flesh-and-blood drummer into its propulsive repertoire won it widespread mainstream acclaim and Britain's pop Pulitzer, the prestigious Mercury Prize. It also caused jungle to be perceived as having the same relation to contemporary dance music as jazz funk did to disco.

So, in response to the gauntlet thrown down by New Forms , Goldie did what any genre figurehead would do. He wrote a symphony. A 60-minute symphony for computer, sampler, mixing desk, drum machine and 40-piece orchestra designed to deal with his abandonment issues. It's called "Mother."

Albert Brooks had a movie out last year called Mother that no one went to see, but at least he dealt with his mom-related angst in a comedic fashion. Goldie's epic has no intentional laughs. It kicks off with 10 minutes of hissing perhaps meant to paint an aural picture of the fetal Goldie at peace in the womb. Then those drums start clattering and life turns harsh and ugly for the next hour until a pastoral-almost Lloyd Webberian-string motif announces a healing of old wounds.

Goldie's one of these guys, like Tricky (with whom he once physically clashed for the hand of Björk) and the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, who don't actually play anything or program anything or produce anything. Instead, he utilizes studio practitioners to exorcise the cacophony of sound fragments writhing around inside his head. The coaxing of "Mother" from his noggin must have been as complex as a salvage operation on the Titanic ; as frustrating, too, being as the number of individuals destined to make it all the way through the marathon dwindles to single figures once you remove the countless engineers, producers, orchestrators and musicians involved in its construction.

I'm no expert, but I'm guessing that the second CD in the Saturnz Return set will probably be regarded as the more commercial offering. It's got big-name guest shots: Noel Gallagher smears distorto-guitar on "Temper Temper," KRS-1 does a George Jetson-like free-style rap on "Digital" ("Representing the Internet!" he declares at one point, trying to sound millennial) and David Bowie, his own voyage into jungle a fool's errand, emotes on "Truth." It's got range: The flute-driven "Dragonfly" is perkily tropical enough to accompany a commercial for coconut-scented conditioner; "Demonz" is out-and-out ultra-violence, with crushing percussion seemingly sampled from discharged firearms. It's even got songs: Goldie's long-serving in-house singer, Diane Charlemagne, fronts the Sade-like "Believe" and "Crystal Clear," and the jungle auteur himself lets a whispery, tremulous vocal loose on "Letter of Fate," which sets to music a suicide note he penned some years ago.

There is much about Goldie to induce angina in the marketing executive assigned the task of introducing him to a wide American audience. He's an artist who doesn't have a clearly defined role: the hip-hop, R&B, jazz funk and rock components in his music defy categorization, making him ineligible to fit into any kind of radio format, and his vaulting ambitions are continually let down by his stultifyingly boring live show. You can't even get away with calling him an artist of the future because he's got a bunch of songs that sound like they wouldn't be out of place on an old Roy Ayers album. Luckily, marketing him is someone else's headache. As long as I've got a CD player with a shuffle option, Goldie can overreach for the sky.

So let's jump forward 15 years to a time when Celine Dion is considered cool. It will probably take until 2012 for society to have advanced to a point where a public expression of appreciation for Ms. Dion is not considered an elaborate put-on. In this atmosphere of tolerance, Celine Dion aficionados will be able to discuss her colossal lung power and how it belies her birdlike frame. They will raise glasses in a toast to the tenacity that saw the French-Canadian canary not only become phonetically fluent in English but also tame the unmanageable frizz with which she struggled during her tenure as a Québécois LeAnn Rimes. They will pay tribute to her unapologetic squareness, noting that while the likes of Janet Jackson, Madonna and Mariah Carey made strenuous attempts to keep their music contemporary and their lyrics confessional and libidinous, Ms. Dion remained untouched by time or trend. Her niche, they will conclude, was high drama; given a plaintive three-minute declaration of heartache, she was capable of delivering a soaring, showy performance. Ultimately, they will decide, she was the unfunkiest of divas. Then mention of her 1997 album, Let's Talk About Love (550 Music/Epic), will come up, and they'll fall silent. Because even in that mythical future when Celine Dion is considered cool, Let's Talk About Love will be thought of as her least cool album.

To the untrained ear, this record is just as much of a sack of suck as her previous outing, Falling Into You . But I say No. Falling Into You featured Ms. Dion's made-in-heaven collaboration with Jim Steinman, the cataclysmic "It's All Coming Back to Me Now." It featured one of hired hitwoman Diane Warren's most lethal concoctions, "Because You Loved Me." It featured Ms. Dion's riven-with-despair rendition of Eric Carmen's "All By Myself." It would even have featured some songs produced by Phil Spector, except that the wandering genius wanted to keep Ms. Dion locked in the vocal booth for six months. Even in his insanity, however, Mr. Spector proved cognizant of the fact that Celine Dion functions best as the eye of the storm.

There is, of course, no Phil Spector collaboration on Let's Talk About Love . There are no Diane Warren songs, and Jim Steinman's presence is limited to a meager "Additional Production" credit. In their place, heavy friends have been dragooned into duty on an album designed to set in stone the notion of Ms. Dion as less of a singer and more of an international monument.

The entire project is, in my estimation, an unmitigated disaster. It kicks off in time-honored fashion with a bombastic power ballad, "The Reason," co-written by Carole King and produced by Sir George Martin. Thus, straight away, we find the inherent wrongheadedness of this record. Carole King hasn't written a memorable song in many a year and-hello?-didn't George Martin recently announce that he was quitting the producing racket because his hearing was going? The latter affliction was probably incurred by a silent prayer offered up during the recording of "The Reason" to be struck deaf.

Ms. Dion's team-up with the Bee Gees is similarly dispiriting. One of the up-to-now immutable laws of science is that if you put the Gibb brothers with a female singer, the results will be sensational. History is littered with examples: "Love Me" by Yvonne Elliman; "Ain't Nothing Going to Keep Me From You" by Teri De Sario; "Emotion" by Samantha Sang; and "Heartbreaker" by Dionne Warwick. "Immortality" belongs on a whole different sort of list. The cement-laden dirge-taken, horrifically, from the upcoming stage musical adaptation of Saturday Night Fever -defeats both Ms. Dion and the Gibbs. Departing from dramatics proves, as always, a glaring error for this most rigid and unspontaneous of performers. She's fallen on her face before when attempting to be as one with the rhythm, but Celine Dion has never humiliated herself as comprehensively as she does when mashing it up in a dance-hall style on "Treat Her Like a Lady." As Seinfeld' s George Costanza remarked in a similar situation, "Sweet fancy Moses!"

The centerpiece of Let's Talk About Love is "Tell Him," a duet with Barbra Streisand. The last time Ms. Streisand made a record with another female artist was on "Enough Is Enough" with Donna Summer. During the recording, Ms. Summer was reportedly so intimidated that she attempted to outdo her partner by holding a note so long it caused her to pass out. Anyone who's witnessed, through the cracks of his or her fingers, the video for "Tell Him" in which Ms. Dion relates to Ms. Streisand like a newly born fawn nuzzling up against its mother, will sense that this is no diva face-off. The two singers give each other room to emote, restraining themselves until the final choruses before transforming into something akin to a pair of drunks wrestling over the microphone on karaoke night.

But this is nothing compared to the album's other massive guest appearance. Luciano Pavarotti has sung with Bryan Adams, Elton John and Bono. But Celine Dion has something his previous pop partners have lacked. She's audible. This proves to be a hideous miscalculation, given the caliber of song they've chosen to share. "I Hate You Then I Love You," a retitled remake of an old Shirley Bassey song, "Never Never Never," is a clattering camp travesty during which the big man and the little sparrow indulge in some pent-up sexual jousting. All the unleashed octaves in the world fail to expunge the mental image of the most unfeasible coupling since Biggie Smalls and Li'l Kim.

A sliver of redemption is found in the passable version of Leo Sayer's "When I Need You" and a perky piece of club pop, "Just a Little Bit of Love." But the only moment approaching Vintage Dion is the crushing ballad "My Heart Will Go On." Finally, all the components are in place: the ornate arrangement, the overblown orchestration, the thunderous drums and the chorus hysterical enough to allow Ms. Dion to crank up past Valkyrie level. The song turns out to be the closing theme from James Cameron's Titanic . Fitting, because, even to the Celine Dion cheerleaders in 2012, Let's Talk About Love is going to go down like that ill-fated vessel.

"What About" is The Velvet Rope 's most emotionally abandoned selection, but it certainly isn't any kind of anomaly in terms of its uncosmeticized openness. In the course of the album's 75-minute run, Ms. Jackson addresses her masturbatory dream-life ("My Need"), her enthusiasm for bondage ("Rope Burn"), her unwillingness to be shackled by the parameters of gender ("Free Xone" and a re-reading of Rod Stewart's 1976 hit "Tonight's the Night" as an invitation to a threesome), and her desire to cruise a club, snag a stud, drag him home and do him ("Go Deep"). At first listen, this isn't the work of the Janet Jackson who 11 years earlier whispered "Let's Wait Awhile." But, actually, that's exactly what it is.

There used to be another Janet Jackson. Aimless, chubby-cheeked, seemingly talent-free and determinedly trading off the family name, she made dead-duck albums like Dream Street and fleshed out the casts of Good Times and Fame . That Janet Jackson disappeared in 1986 after a trip to Minneapolis for the purposes of meeting writer-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Famed for their practice of delving deep into an artist's personality to fashion their music, Messrs. Jam and Lewis found in Ms. Jackson yards of blank canvas. And on that surface they painted a masterpiece. Control was a perfect slice of sassy, thumping mid-80's pop. Once a chirpy cipher, Janet was suddenly the voice of all good little girls straining at the leash. She took no quarter from her family, gave her slack-ass boyfriend his marching orders and haughtily informed the roughnecks of the world that her first name wasn't baby, it was Janet-Miss Jackson, if you were nasty.

Rhythm Nation 1814 in 1989, was a conceptual misstep that saw Janet sup too thirstily from brother Michael's messiah mug. Despite lyrics and videos that depicted her as some funky clubland Gestapo figure who saved blameless urchins from the blood-soaked streets, she breathed rapturous life into some of her most exhilarating material, songs like "Love Will Never Do (Without You)," "Escapade" and "Come Back to Me." Janet , in 1993, was an extended exploration of the singer's sexuality. Sweetness and lust coiled around each other on "That's the Way Love Goes," "The Body That Loves You," "Throb" and "Any Time Any Place." The Velvet Rope is the Janet of all these albums. She still wants to be in control, she still wants respect, and she still has family issues. (On "You," she points an accusing finger at an intimate who has "learned to survive in your fictitious world." Educated guess: It ain't Tito!) But now she also wants to be tied up, to get down and, ultimately, to find love. No wonder she hangs her newly hennaed head of corkscrew curls on the cover. She's got a lot on her mind.

Of course, it may seem like she's got Madonna's Erotica album on her mind. The records share similar thematic preoccupations, but Madonna had off-loaded her most sympathetic collaborator, Patrick Leonard, by that point and Erotica 's hooks rarely matched its shocks. Ms. Jackson, on the other hand, has, with her decade-long association with Jam & Lewis forged one of the most creatively rewarding alliances in the history of popular music. The 90's haven't been a banner decade for the two producers. They may not have sunk as low as Malcolm McLaren, but their Perspective Records imprint was a drastic underperformer and their recent catalogue of hits for the likes of Boyz II Men, Mary J. Blige and Vanessa Williams has tended toward the serviceable and away from the inspirational. This from a team who ended the 80's constructing a knockout album for Pia Zadora.

Working with Janet Jackson, though, returns the duo to full artistic power. For the on-line fantasy "Empty," they surround her ruminations with an ornate keyboard loop, then painstakingly increase tension, throwing in skittery, frantic drum programs and swirling sound effects. On "What About," they shift gears from moist, acoustic contemplation to the jagged little attack of the chorus. On the AIDS elegy "Together Again," they send Janet's sentiments floating heavenward, propelled by a shimmering mirror ball of a disco backdrop over which she emotes like Diana Ross circa The Boss.

The Velvet Rope climaxes with "Special," a summing-up of the singer's emotional journey, which brings in a children's choir and emphasizes the key phrase, "You've got to water your spiritual garden." Just as you're expecting Deepak Chopra to add some closing thoughts, Ms. Jackson suddenly curtails the song with a curt "Work in progress," in reference to herself.

Wherever Janet Jackson's voyage of self-discovery leads her-whether she devotes herself to saving beagles, learning cabala or practicing tantric sex-it can only be hoped an album as unexpected and affecting as The Velvet Rope is the ultimate result. All told, 1997 is shaping up to be a vintage diva season. Next up, Céline Dion's album, which, it's rumored, recounts a particularly traumatic depilatory mishap.

Even though the singer was unresponsive, beyond declaring that this is her time to grow, leaving Ms. Winfrey flapping around unsatisfied like the emotionally ravenous carrion crow she is, the host cannot be fully faulted for her prurient interest. Suddenly, Mariah Carey has an angle. All the other globally feted formula goddesses have personal lives whose degrees of turbulence resonate within their music. Madonna, her selective amnesia at the MTV Video Music Awards notwithstanding, has always lived her life as one long, unfolding biopic with accompanying soundtrack. Janet Jackson asserted her individuality from that family and continues to document her journey into sexuality and self-awareness. Whitney Houston continues to try to transcend speculation over her contentious gender preferences and combative marriage. Toni Braxton's career seems to be a prolonged exercise in shocking the preacher parents who kept her away from boys until her late teens.

But what do we know of Mariah Carey beyond her seven-octave squeak, her luxuriantly tousled 'do and her fairy tale marriage to the mogul who mentored her? She trills prettily through lavishly produced records that sell up a storm and evaporate almost instantly. In videos, she's an unaffected perky princess sitting on a swing, shrieking on a Big Dipper or frolicking in a meadow. The worst problem you could imagine befalling her is one of her party guests getting their tongue frozen to her ice sculpture. Baring her claws in an interview last year, Madonna hissed that she'd rather be dead than be Mariah Carey singing her happy little songs.

Not for the first, or last, time in her career, Madonna looks like a fool, because the new Mariah Carey album, Butterfly (Columbia), is a letter full of tears. After a decade's worth of stretching the syllables of Hallmark homilies, Ms. Carey finally has something to sing about. In the course of this past year, she has become estranged from her husband, fled from their palatial dwelling in Bedford Corners, N.Y., jettisoned her longtime manager and lawyer, and started her own record label. She's also been romantically linked to hip-hop impresario Sean (Puffy) Combs, New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter and rapper Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest. The video for "Honey," the first single from Butterfly , portrays Ms. Carey handcuffed to a chair in the middle of a mansion, subject to the unwelcome attentions of an aging Italian. Seconds later, she breaks for freedom and starts singing, "It's just like honey when your love comes over me.…" Once submissive and demure, Ms. Carey seems to be declaring herself liberated and libidinous.

On the strength of "Honey"-whose remix video features the barely clad canary flirting outrageously with Puff Daddy and his batboy Mase- Butterfly promises healthy doses of candor and fantasy. It delivers both of these, but in unexpected ways. After "Honey," the only up-tempo song on the entire album, Ms. Carey dissects the dissolution of her marriage in flowery terms. "Blindly I imagined I could keep you under glass," she intones on the title track. "Now I understand that I must open up my hands and watch you rise." You may cringe at the if-you-love-something-set-it-free sentiment, but lounge acts and drag queens the world over will now be able to include in their repertoire a standard worthy of being warbled alongside "The Rose" and "I Will Always Love You."

Ms. Carey stays in a moist mood throughout, reflecting on trysts past in "The Roof" ( Remember, we did it on the roof? ) and "Fourth of July" ( Remember, we did it on the Fourth of July? ). Putting her silky whisper next to the stoned burr of Krayzie Bone and Wish Bone of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, she chronicles post-split misery on "Breakdown." For her collaboration with the ubiquitous Missy Elliot ("Babydoll"), she paints a vivid picture of herself drunk and lonely in a hotel suite, checking the phone for messages every minute.

For much of Butterfly , Ms. Carey reins in her trademark vocal swoops and spirals, so the moments when she breaks the mood and reverts to type are particularly disconcerting. "My All" and "Whenever You Call" are standard devotional anthems-Ms. Carey has shattered glass with Identikit renditions a million times before-but amid the confessional nature of the rest of the album, they sound like the caterwauling of a Miss America contestant showing off in the talent round.

Both songs are co-written with her seasoned musical director Walter Afanasieff, who redeems himself with Butterfly' s two other out-and-out multi-Kleenex tear-jerkers. "Close My Eyes" has Ms. Carey reflecting on her fast-track ascendancy and wearily admitting " … maybe I grew up a little too soon." Then there's the closing song, "Outside." Back in 1990, her debut hit, the unsingable "Vision of Love," caught the attention of some listeners with its opening-verse admission that the singer "suffered from alienation." None of her subsequent output would ever elaborate on that line. But sometimes, you've just got to pour it all out: "It's hard to explain, inherently it's always been strange, neither here nor there, always somewhat out of place everywhere, ambiguous without a sense of belonging, to touch somewhere halfway, feeling there's no one completely the same." Had Billy Corgan squawked those same words, Midwestern teenagers by the thousands would have razored them into their arms.

If you thought Mariah Carey's music was bland and vapid before, Butterfly won't alter your opinion one iota. The strings still shower, the keyboards still tinkle, and she still soars over the parapets before the final chorus. But if you never thought of her as human before, Butterfly will change your mind. Prick her and she bleeds.