Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 5, 1995 TAG: 9508090001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PETER WATROUS N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Selena, 23, the Mexican-American singer from Corpus Christi, Texas, who was murdered by a fan on March 31, was just that sort of attraction.
Sometimes her voice quivered. Sometimes she roughed it up a bit. At its best, it had a coolness, a type of unadorned passion that can be heard in places on her new album, ``Dreaming of You'' (EMI Latin/EMI Records).
The album is a posthumous release that in its own scattered way represents the crossover record that she had been planning before her death.
Selena was the queen of tejano music, the music of the Texas-Mexico border, and she was the one who was about to make the style big. Not only was she selling huge quantities of her own Spanish-language records, but she was poised to release an English-language recording that was uncompleted at her death.
``Dreaming of You'' is what record companies turn out when a star dies. It's a collection of what was left in the vault; there are even T-shirts and baseball caps offered for sale on the back of the album's booklet.
A handful of Spanish-language hits are meant to bolster the slightly thin feeling of what is largely a collection of leftovers.
Included are two mariachi pieces, a duet with David Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads, from a soundtrack for the forthcoming movie ``Blue in the Face'' and a collaboration with the singing group Barrio Boyzz.
Five English-language tracks were intended for the album she never completed. The songs are all competent, but undistinguished, and, oddly enough, the Spanish-language hits, even the lightweight ``Bidi Bidi Bom Bom,'' sound better than the English-language tracks.
It's not that she didn't sing well in English; she spoke English substantially better than she did Spanish. It's that the English song writers didn't step up to the bar with their best material. The music is faceless commerce.
That she sings it so well on the album suggests that she had a good chance of success, working lush ballads in an anonymous pop style that Disney has mastered.
The mariachi tracks have a slightly ironic feeling to them that makes their weepiness satisfying. She sounds as if she's winking as she sings them, and she sings better on them than she does on much of the rest of the material.
On her Spanish-language hits - ``Amor Prohibido'' and ``Bidi Bidi Bom Bom'' - she and her band do what they do best, merge older styles with contemporary music, from reggae to mainstream pop.
It's the expression of a border culture in the modern age, where musicians can pick and choose what they want to be, how they want to sing. There's a power in the music that isn't so evident in the English-language songs, pieces that could have been sung by anybody, at any place and at any time.
by CNB