Jackson is in need of some major deweirdification, but the only real moment of insight came from his wife. When Sawyer asked about the meaning behind his facial reconstruction, Jackson just stared at her through cold, bulging, heavily lidded eyes. Finally he said, inexplicably, “I think it creates itself . . .” At that point, Lisa Marie jumped in. “He has every right,” she snapped. “He’s an artist. He resculpted himself.” If only Jackson could put things so simply. His new double album, “HIStory: Past, Present and Future – Book I,” due out this week, comes across as an exercise in delusion. Throughout 15 new songs (another 15 are greatest hits), Jackson rants, stutters, hiccups and screams about the supposed injustices carried out against him. Barely a song goes by without some reference to his newfound status as the world’s greatest victim. Choking on his words, folding them so deep into his sledgehammer beats that it’s often hard to decipher what he’s saying, Jackson finds countless new ways of expressing defensiveness, self-pity and self-obsession. “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me,” he semi-raps in “They Don’t Care About Us.” When Sawyer questioned the anti-Semitic undertone, Jackson reverted to defensiveness, saying his best friends are Jews (moguls Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg) and that the song is against racism.
But “HIStory” is defined by paranoia. “Money” seems plainly directed at the 13-year-old boy who two years ago brought a civil suit against Jackson, charging molestation; the case was settled out of court, with Jackson reportedly paying off the family in the neighborhood of $10 million to $20 million. “If you show me the cash then I will take it/If you tell me to cry then I will fake it,” Jackson accuses. “Scream,” a jittery industrial dance number featuring sister Janet, is simply there to remind us he’s angry. (The single debuted at No. 5 in Billboard.) In the incredibly hip, reportedly $7 million video, the siblings wander around their own private space-world, bouncing off walls and smashing guitars like a couple of mismatched, junkie-chic androids. The mega-choreographed dance numbers from Michael and Janet’s video pasts seem a little quaint now, but “Scream” kind of makes you long for the relatively low-tech days of the ’80s. You want to scream right back at them, Hey! Would you two please shut up and dance?
All this shouting and whining has a perverse effect: it almost makes you forget Jackson has been cleared. When stacked up against “HIStory”’s brilliant, classic material (“Billie Jean,” “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “She’s Out of My Life”), Michael’s new songs leave you thinking he has nothing artistically left to say. He got married last year, but outside a washed-out R. Kelly ballad there’s not a single love song on the album. Except for a passing dedication to her in a long list that also includes Diana Ross, Thomas Edison and Boyz II Men, Lisa Marie is conspicuously absent. Jackson may have every right to resculpt himself, but what he’s turning into is as inflated and empty as the statue of himself on the album cover. He chose to defend himself on disc, not on the stand. But as a substitute for a day in court, “HIStory” is one overwrought cop-out.
