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With so many so curious to know just what kind of attitude characterizes Morissette's second album — banshee? blissed out? — here, without further ado, is a sample chorus: ''Look at me, I'm a girl that some may preconceive/Why do they try to generalize, why are they antagonizing me.../I wantcha/You know I'll never stop 'til I've gotcha/You'll never be quite the same when I rock ya/I'm not the kind of girl that you thought I was...''

Evidently not. Oops: That was from Morissette's first second album, 1992's Now Is the Time, an out-of-print disc from north of the border, released when she was still an overly made-up, severely bejeweled Canadian teen star using the mononym of Alanis. Encouraged by her Ottawa schoolteacher parents, the moptop spent a season getting slimed on Nickelodeon's You Can't Do That on Television! at age 10, cut her first single shortly thereafter, released her first hit album at 16, and had a nervous breakdown at 17, before professionally regaining her last name and starting from scratch. Jagged Little Pill, set down in the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest-selling debut ever, was actually her third album, if a career starter in spirit.

Chris Rock, who stars as the apostle Rufus in Dogma, says he and Morissette (whom he's taken to calling ''Lanny Love'') bonded on an off day while taking in Spike Lee's He Got Game, the story of a basketball prodigy under too much pressure at too tender an age, which resonated all too well. ''You remember that scene where the uncle is talking to the kid and asking when he's gonna get his?'' asks Rock. ''Alanis just turned to me and said, 'That's my life.' And I said, 'That's mine, too!' And we hit it off from there.... After you talk to her for a while, and then somebody tells you she's only 24, you're like, 'Get the f--- out of here!' She's got it down, man.''

Before anyone bets against her longevity, then, it may be instructive to recall that by virtue (or vice) of growing up in public, Morissette had the chance to get most of her mistakes out of the way before her second coming. Rather than shrink from any unflattering memories of a frothily misspent youth, Morissette sympathetically memorializes her prefab teen self in a new song, ''UR,'' which describes her pre-pubescent introduction to show business, charting her progress — from ''naive you are'' to ''terrified you are'' to ''ruthless you are'' to, finally, self-forgivingly, ''precious you are.''

Oh, and ''precocious you are'' — that, Morissette most emphatically still is. Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie is the remarkable, almost relentlessly confessional journal of a woman age 24 going on 39. Raging it's not, except in memory. (The one truly angry song, ''Pollyanna Flower,'' has been relegated to a B side, probably for fear of giving anyone too easy an excuse to revive ''You Oughta Know''-era stereotypes.) Ironically, perhaps, irony hardly figures into her guileless palette either. The details may be overtly autobiographical in many instances, but the themes in this sharp and earnest veritable soundtrack to The Drama of the Gifted Child will be recognizable to just about anyone who ever reckoned herself an overachiever, professionally or emotionally. Certainly it'll polarize critics and music fans to the same degree her previous album did: It's as easy to imagine cynics thinking ''Get over yourself, Alanis'' as they pore through the conversational self-analysis of ''I Was Hoping'' or ''Unsent'' as it is to picture those more empathetically inclined getting weepy as she pays homage to her mother in ''Heart of the House'' or counsels a suicidal friend in ''Joining You.'' Listening to the 17-song set in a straight shot, you might even find yourself indulging both reactions.


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