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This is an odd and uncomfortable habit that Marc Anthony has fallen into, this habit of wading through the wake generated by Ricky Martin. It dates back to when they were teen-agers: Martin, after failing two auditions, finally cracked the lineup of Menudo, the Puerto Rican bubble-gum group, for which Anthony wrote songs and sang backup. It happened again last February in Los Angeles, at the Grammy Awards. By then both singers had built huge Spanish-speaking audiences and were looking to invade the Anglo market. Anthony's star was ascendant; Martin was, at best, a shadowy blip on the pop-culture radar. But it was Martin who was invited to perform that night, and he did so with such pansexual verve that the world was left panting for more. He also took home a Grammy. Anthony won a Grammy, too, during the pre-broadcast part of the show, while his limo was stuck in traffic outside.

And now, on a muggy Saturday afternoon in Atlantic City, a different limousine disgorges Anthony in front of the Trump Taj Mahal. Tonight he is giving one of his last concerts before the release of his debut English CD, on Sept. 28. He promenades through the lobby, past the clanging slots and down a carpeted hallway. Suddenly he finds himself in front of a newsstand where Ricky Martin stares out at him, again and again and again, from a Time magazine cover that reads ''Latin Music Goes Pop!'' Martin's English-language debut was released the previous week, selling more than 660,000 copies. It was the biggest first week in the history of Columbia Records, which also happens to be Marc Anthony's new label.

If all had gone as planned, Anthony's own record would have been out by now, and he, not Martin, might have been the Latin-pop poster boy. But his record was delayed, first by the Martin Scorsese film he was shooting, then by a legal battle so nasty that Anthony, who is 30, considered quitting his recording career altogether.

After the sound check, as Anthony relaxes in his hotel suite, I feel obliged to ask him if the Ricky Martin delirium has stolen some of his thunder. ''God, I couldn't be happier, man,'' he says, crossing and uncrossing his legs. He is whisper-thin, hepped up, almost maniacally affable. ''I've always come in under the radar, you know what I mean? I'm not one of those people who sits around and is like, I want the world to know what I'm doing. No, no, no. I'd rather be the pleasant surprise. Anyway, Ricky's Ricky, and I do something totally different.''

This has come to be the consensus, that Marc Anthony is totally different, and not just from Ricky Martin. First there is his voice: Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton have each told him he sings ''like an angel,'' though there is more to him than that. When he sings salsa, with its melodramatic lyrics, its kinetic percussion and yammering horns, he begins a song in silky whispers and ends with raunchy shouts, evolving from heartsick boy next door to conquering lover man. Then there is his presence. Onstage and on film, he combines cool magnetism with an open, sometimes goofy urgency. Paul Simon, who cast Anthony as the lead in his musical, ''The Capeman,'' compares him to a young Sinatra; during the show's brief Broadway run, Anthony was a backstage magnet for everyone from Madonna to Colin Powell. Finally there is the sincerity factor. ''When he sings a song,'' says Don Ienner, the president of Columbia Records, ''you just believe what the [expletive] guy is saying.''

The implication is that Anthony, unlike Ricky Martin, is more interpreter than entertainer, more Sinatra than Menudo. Columbia is thrilled with Martin's success, but he delivers a perishable audience, young and girly. Anthony is being treated like an unseasoned but potentially fine wine. ''The intent here,'' Ienner says, ''is to have a boxed set of Marc Anthony. We're not looking for a few hits -- we're looking for history.''

Hype, of course, comes in many flavors, and this year's flavor is Latino. That is largely the doing of Tommy Mottola, Ienner's boss and the chairman of Sony Music Entertainment, which in the course of just a few months will have released records by Anthony, Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez and the meringue singer Elvis Crespo. Sales of Latin music, from teen-age Nuyoricans to the patriarchal Buena Vista Social Club, have risen significantly the last several years, and all the major American labels have scrambled to sign Latino singers. Sony, though, has the greatest appetite by far. ''Tommy wants to gobble up the world,'' says Jerry Shustek, Anthony's business manager.

It was Mottola, Ienner says, who first sensed that Latin music could snowball into a kind of ''new Seattle scene.'' Mottola perhaps also sensed that in the midst of a music-business doldrums, the globally oriented Sony had much to gain by promoting singers who already have a huge Spanish-language fan base and who might translate well into English. In any case, the media have gleefully played along with this ''discovery.''

''Sure it's hype,'' Mottola says, ''but we'll take it. And with or without the 'Latin explosion,' Marc Anthony is, would have been and will be a superstar.'' Mottola so badly wants this to be true that he has signed Anthony to a bilingual, multirecord deal worth more than $30 million.

But at this Atlantic City show, Anthony is still singing only in Spanish. The sold-out house of 5,292 knows he won't be theirs alone for long. Young women have brought along their sisters, their mothers, their boyfriends. (Anthony is neither too soft nor too macho to turn off the boyfriend contingent.) They shriek and moan and pepper the stage with lingerie and Puerto Rican flags. When it's over, they take their time leaving. As Anthony retreats backstage, it is left to his band members to put a final punctuation on the evening's concert. Just outside Anthony's dressing room, they chant over and over, ''Ricky who?'' pounding the walls in time, sounding less like a joke than a threat.

On a cloudless day a few months before that performance, Marc Anthony can be found at home, on the 36th floor of a luxury building at 92d Street and York Avenue. His living room is dominated by a 62-inch television set and myriad photographs of his 5-year-old daughter, Arianna, who lives with her mother, a New York City policewoman. He stands in front of his wraparound windows and points down at the scenes of his youth: the apartment in Spanish Harlem where he grew up as Marco Antonio Muniz, the youngest of eight children born to Puerto Rican immigrants. The spot in the East River where he and Bigram Zayas, his half-brother who is now his manager and best friend, nearly drowned. And the nightclubs all over upper Manhattan and the Bronx where he sang for more than a decade.

Dressed in a black Prada suit and smoking a Newport, Anthony has about him the air of someone prepared to seriously change gears. It's finally time to start thinking about his English record. He has just finished work on ''Bringing Out the Dead,'' the bleak Scorsese film in which he plays a brain-damaged homeless man. Thanks to his acting, Anthony has begun to see his name in the gossip columns, as both a lover (he has dated, among others, Mira Sorvino, and is ''very close friends'' with Jennifer Lopez) and a fighter (he and Tom Sizemore reportedly came to blows on the Scorsese set).

He insists, however, that he's a homebody, that he'd rather spend time with his daughter or play computer games than troll nightclubs. Full-throttle stardom, he says, doesn't hold much appeal. ''It's not a part of my makeup,'' he says. ''I'm eager to be satisfied. It's all about the music, and everything else is peaches and cream.''

He has been surrounded by music since he was born. His father, a musician, turned their kitchen into one long jam session, with Anthony hopping onto the table for his numbers. Already he had a voice that drew gasps. When he started out performing in clubs, Anthony sang dance music in English, and wrote in both English and Spanish (for Menudo, among others). After a time he crossed over to singing salsa, a florid Latin form of his parents' generation. That might have seemed a bad career move, an embrace of a decidedly unhip genre, but Anthony pulled it off. Among his gifts as a singer are the abilities to convey romance without mawkishness and irreverence without condescension.

Working with Sergio George, a pioneering salsa producer, and Ralph Mercado, a powerful Latin-music mogul, Anthony made two records that sold a combined 700,000 copies, an unprecedented figure for salsa. With his career seemingly booming, Anthony happily let others sweat the details.

But in 1996, his attitude of gracious complacency faded after a check he had written for his daughter bounced: he asked Zayas to look into his finances. Zayas, 12 years older than Anthony, had always been as much a father as a big brother. He knew nothing, however, about show business. For the previous nine years, he had worked in operations at an investment firm in Connecticut.

Concluding that Anthony had been short-changed at every turn, Zayas eventually -- reluctantly -- took on the role of manager. He began to recalibrate the apparatus of Anthony's career, ''bringing corporate America into the way things were being done,'' as he calls it. ''A lot of people thought we were kind of abrasive.''

At the top of that list was Ralph Mercado, a figure so formidable in the Latin-music business that it was considered unwise to challenge him. But Anthony decided that he wanted out of the contract he had signed with Mercado in 1992, which bound him for five more records. He also decided he might want to record in English -- which, after all, was the first language he sang in. A confrontation seemed inevitable.

To celebrate his label's 10th anniversary, Mercado put together an all-star concert in New Jersey, with Anthony advertised as the headliner. But, Anthony says, he hadn't been told about the concert. He refused to perform and threatened never to record for Mercado again unless Mercado allowed him to record in English for another label. By now Anthony was the most popular act in Mercado's stable, and Mercado gave in.

In the fall of 1997, Anthony's third salsa record, ''Contra la Corriente'' (''Against the Current''), was finished. Though it shipped 350,000 copies, Anthony couldn't tour to promote it because of his commitment to ''The Capeman,'' the Paul Simon musical. Zayas suggested the next best thing: an ''Off to Broadway'' blowout concert, at Madison Square Garden. This was an audacious move. No salsa singer had ever played the Garden as a solo act. Just as audacious was Zayas's plan to freeze out Ralph Mercado and self-promote the concert. ''I'm like, 'Are you out of your mind?' ''Anthony recalls. ''Bigram says, 'We put up the money and we make the money.' And we sold out, 360 degrees around. That's what Bigram is all about, just getting things done. It's been incredible. Forget night and day, man -- it's like up in the Arctic, where it's night for six months and then day for six months.''

The ballroom of the San Juan Hotel and Casino in Puerto Rico is a long way from Madison Square Garden. Beneath the scalloped curtains and twinkling chandeliers sit a few hundred tuxedoed bankers, lawyers, politicians and their wives, working their way through pumpkin soup with almonds. At the head table, Marc Anthony does the same.

He is considered something of a saint here. Last year, when Hurricane Georges struck, Anthony promised to build 100 houses for homeless families. A friend had told him each prefabricated house would cost $3,400. As it turned out, the friend hadn't factored in a few details, like plumbing and concrete foundations and legal fees, so the actual price was more like $20,000 per house.

Still, Anthony promised 100 houses. So although he has already raised $500,000, he is giving another benefit concert tonight. He is seated between his date, Dayanara Torres, a former Miss Universe, and Jennifer Lopez. When it is time to sing, Anthony slips out to the terrace for a cup of chamomile tea and one last Newport. He considers relieving himself over the balustrade, but his fame is great enough here to prevent him from tempting paparazzi fate.

He climbs onstage to hearty but polite applause. The percussion kicks in, then the guitars and keyboards, and then the horns, and by the time a pure and wonderful sound escapes from Marc Anthony's mouth, the women in the crowd have rushed to the stage, which is low enough that they can grab at his feet. This is not without its danger. Anthony is not the dancer that Ricky Martin is, so he compensates with a constant flurry of boyish exertion. As he sings, he shadow boxes, skips, prances and stalks his way about the stage, then suddenly freezes, holding a note forever, and by the time he lets it go, the men, too, have come forward, abandoning their $500-a-plate reserve, and for the next 90 minutes no one in the room is willing to take his eyes off the astonishing singer on the ugly ballroom stage, not even the waiters, who back out of the room with trays full of dirty plates.

Afterward, he opens a Heineken and lights a cigarette. Jennifer Lopez, in a tight red dress with spaghetti straps, pops grapes into her mouth, one at a time. ''She's like my wife,'' Anthony says, wiping his forehead of sweat, ''only we don't get to have any fun.''

''In the carnal sense of the word,'' she explains. Her ensuing giggle does nothing to clarify the rumors of their romance.

The talk turns to the subject of Anthony's voice, and how he does what he does with it. ''I've never sung a song and not felt it,'' he says, ''felt every word of it.'' It might be a cliche, but in his case it might also be true.

A few minutes later, he and Lopez head downstairs to a casino room that has been roped off for family and friends. Anthony's mother and father, who are divorced, both live here, and now he flits between them, wrapping them in hugs. It seems as if Anthony will hug anyone, anywhere. Nor is there anything perfunctory about his hugs; they are full-body encounters, full of meaning of one sort or another.

Shevin Conway, a friend of Anthony's from New York, tells me a story about a recent concert in San Francisco. Conway, standing near the stage, saw a young man throw something at Anthony. As Conway signaled the security guards, the man climbed onstage. The guards got ready to pounce, but Anthony waved them off, then wrapped the man in a long, hard hug. ''He totally defused the situation,'' Conway says. ''That's the thing about Marc -- the talent is only a part of it. He's like a heart with arms.''

He has also been called, by detractors, a voice on legs -- that is, a great singer without the depth to forge a career. This is where Tommy Mottola comes in. Mottola says he will do everything in his power to turn Anthony into an international star, and Mottola's power within the music business is just shy of limitless. He also leaves little to chance. It was Mottola who handpicked Anthony's producers and songwriters, veterans of hits by Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, R. Kelly and the like. Anthony himself hadn't written songs in more than a decade, but when he got into the studio he promptly began collaborating with the hired songwriters. ''I explained to him that was the retirement money for his grandchildren,'' says Jerry Shustek, Anthony's business manager.

Shustek also helped steer Anthony out of the predicament that nearly crippled his career. Last summer, after a heated courtship with several labels, Anthony signed with Columbia to record in English. Though Ralph Mercado still owned his Spanish-language rights, Anthony no longer wanted to do business of any sort with Mercado. Shustek and Zayas tried to buy out Anthony's contract, but they say Mercado wouldn't even sit down with them. As it happened, they had already set in motion a backup plan -- a potential lawsuit that they say would raise questions about Mercado's business practices.

Anthony's lawyers presented the Mercado camp with a draft of that suit. ''The charges were frivolous,'' says Brian Caplan, one of Mercado's lawyers. Nevertheless, negotiations finally got under way, and then Mercado abruptly filed his own lawsuit against Anthony. That complaint was swiftly withdrawn, but the two sides entered a long and bitter stalemate. At one point Shustek described Mercado to me as ''the Morris Levy of the Latin world.'' When asked to elaborate on that comparison (Levy, a music-industry legend, did business with organized crime and was ultimately convicted of conspiracy to commit extortion), Shustek says that Mercado, like Levy, started successful record labels with new artists -- but ''there have been questions raised as to the reporting practices that Mercado has made to his recording artists.'' (Caplan calls the Levy comparison ''sad and shocking.'')

Anthony's team felt it had a strong case, but worried that a trial might eat up years of Anthony's career. Given the choice of going to court or continuing to record for Mercado, Anthony says he nearly chose a third alternative: never making another record, instead devoting himself to acting and giving concerts.

But the two sides at last reached a settlement, which includes a confidentiality clause barring a discussion of the details. This much, however, is clear: Anthony can record for Columbia in Spanish -- which Mottola is planning, so as not to relinquish Anthony's original fans -- but Mercado has the right, through the end of this year, to release a greatest-hits record.

It is an imperfect solution, Bigram Zayas says, and he admits that it was a solution born of the sudden and wild success of, yes, Ricky Martin, which made Anthony itchy to get on with things.

At the Sony Studios on the West Side of Manhattan, Anthony is finally recording the last vocal tracks on his English-language debut. He is barefoot, wearing black pants and a black tuxedo shirt, unbuttoned all the way. A scapular of Jesus dangles around his neck, and he has shed his wispy goatee. He recently had laser eye surgery and has therefore also shed his glasses, which, onstage especially, gave him an oddly collegiate look.

Today he is recording ''Love Is All,'' a churning, midtempo song that plays like the ultimate makeout soundtrack. While Anthony's record will include an angular, Latin-inflected gem called ''I Need to Know'' (the first single) and a few pumped-up dance tracks, it is heavy on anthemic ballads like this one. A typewritten sheet of the lyrics, resting on the recording console, is not promising: ''All the glory/all the pain/all the passion that turned to ashes/only to rise again.''

This is Anthony's new, Mottola-inspired direction, and the early feedback has not been all good. At a recent showcase concert at Roseland, Anthony performed a salsa set and a pop set. During the latter, the audience flagged; Anthony, though he sang well, seemed to have lost his stage presence -- in part because the material is newer but in part because the earnestness of these pop songs is no match for the brassy exuberance and lyrical momentum of his salsa.

Now, in the studio, the instrumental track for ''Love Is All'' thunders away. Rumor has it that Whitney Houston and Celine Dion wanted to record this song but that Mottola wrested it away for Anthony. Certainly the Whitney and Celine part of the story seems believable -- believable and predictable and perhaps a bit sad. A talent like Marc Anthony's may be rare, but the urge to aim it so squarely into the center of the mainstream is not rare at all.

Anthony steps inside the vocal booth. He crosses himself three times, kisses his fingers and promptly assaults the song, his voice so powerful and liquid and full of emotion that the lyrics become subtext. He is performing some sort of alchemy. It is almost uncomfortable to watch him; it is like coming upon someone wrapped in the deepest throes of passion. But for him, at this moment, the rest of the world doesn't exist. The so-called Latin explosion doesn't exist either, nor do Tommy Mottola or Ralph Mercado or the $20,000 prefabricated houses. There is only the voice, a singular instrument of extraordinary promise, and perhaps that alone will be enough.