Selena "Anthology" EMI Latin BUY IT A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Cher salutes Sonny; Julia Roberts monkeys around Sharps & Flats Music reviews of new music from Sean Lennon, Rufus Wainwright, the Mekons, Joe Ely, Dave Matthews and Scrawl Y E S T E R D A Y Home Movies By Charles Taylor Isn't it romantic? Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn bring a dash of style to Stanley Donen's caper in Paris (05/19/98) R E C E N T_. M U S I C Twentieth Century Vox By Sarah Vowell A farewell to Frank Sinatra -- and to the America he embodied (05/18/98) Hoboken hero By Mary Elizabeth Williams Frank Sinatra ripped out his humble roots when he crossed the Hudson -- but his hometown never forgot him (05/18/98) Sharps and Flats Mini-reviews of Sonic Youth, Tori Amos, Bill Laswell's Miles Davis remixes, The Loud Family and Massive Attack (05/13/98) Costello's 21-artist salute By David Handelman Rhino's new "Songwriting by Elvis Costello" is the cream of the compilation CD crop (05/13/98) Best enemies By Roni Sarig The perfect harmonies of twin sister duo Dana & Karen Kletter (05/06/98) BROWSE THE MUSIC ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BY JOSH KUN It ranks as one of the cruelest ironies in the history of modern celebrity: In 1995, in Room 158 of a Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas, Selena was killed by the president of her fan club. Since then, the spirit of the still-reigning queen of Tejano has been kept alive with Selena dolls, Selena posters and Selena clothes. Now with "Anthology" -- a new 30-track retrospective of Selena's career, which follows her from "Rama Caída" (recorded when she was 14) to "Captive Heart" (recorded three weeks before her death at 23) -- we get something even more clever: the Selena Eucharist. Organized by Selena's father, her most relentless post-mortem marketing coach, "Anthology" unfolds into a three-CD spread, with each flap bearing the image of a different part of Selena's hilly, reclining body. In a sense, by removing each CD, we take aural communion -- every listener becoming the next candle-clutching convert to put their faith in Santa Selena. "Anthology" makes the conversion easy. Accessible and geared for a cross-market audience, it gives us Selena at the beginning and end of her life: the bright-eyed 15-year-old winner of the Tejano industry's coveted Female Vocalist of the Year award and the mature, married pop icon who so completely captured the hearts and minds of a new generation of Mexican-American fans that People magazine bumped "Friends" off the cover of its Southwest editions to memorialize her. At a time when Lilith Fair has made pop divahood virtually synonymous with self-indulgent whiteness, hearing Selena clubify "La Bamba" or growl her way through "No Debes Jugar" couldn't sound more refreshing -- or more culturally necessary. After all, Selena was the anti-Lilith: brown, bilingual and blessed with a big Texas bottom that she flaunted in the face of both Latino and Anglo bleached-blond beauty standards. But if "Anthology" is about the pleasures of memory, it's also about the pitfalls of marketing it. Instead of an actual retrospective, "Anthology" is a selectively compiled tour of three different phases of Selena's career -- "Pop/English," "Mariachi" and "Cumbia"-- only nearly every original song has been remastered, remixed and rerecorded by Selena's brother and songwriting partner, A.B. So the rural ranchera of "Yo Fui Aquella" is now a sugary, pop ballad, and the salsa tendencies of "La Puerta Se Cerró" have been channeled into a mariachi-laced cumbia. Which makes "Anthology," depending on where you stand in the remix-after-death debate, either a polished pop treasure chest that keeps Selena's commitment to constant change alive or a dubious and somewhat cruel exercise in exploitation that treats her catalog as an endless fountain of profit. On Disc 1 (Selena's head), we meet crossover Selena, the last Selena to go public. Ever since her teen debut with Selena y los Dinos, Selena had her sights set on a bilingual commercial breakthrough, a goal partially realized on the triple platinum "Amor Prohibido" (with its "Techno-Cumbia" and its Pretenders make-over "Fotos y Recuerdos") and more fully achieved with the more English-heavy hits of "Dreaming of You" (which included "God's Child," her duet with David Byrne). On "Anthology," her genre-juggling skills shine as she flies through makeshift Latin house ("Amame"), eases into generic dance-floor schlock ("I'm Getting Used to You") and rattles off '80s synth-happy freestyle as if she were Debbie Deb or Lisa Lisa ("Always Mine"). By putting this disc first, her father reminds us that Selena's fame and success weren't based on her reputation as an interpreter of traditional song styles. As with the flashy clothes she designed and sold at her boutique, Selena Etc. (remember the purple pantsuit Jennifer Lopez wore at the beginning of the biopic "Selena"), Selena had a knack, not for preserving regional styles, but for transforming them into colorful pop hybrids. The mariachis and cumbias on Discs 2 and 3 (her waist and legs) bear witness to this. The new mix of "Dame Tu Amor" has enough brass and strings to make it sound like a Bacharach-penned ranchero, and "Qué Creías" proves that when she needed to, Lake Jackson, Texas' favorite good girl could be all finger-pointing fierceness. And though "Anthology" curiously omits the adored "Amor Prohibido," it at least has the good sense to wind down with the playful and commanding "Baila Esta Cumbia," a quintessential slice of cumbia-pop that rightfully remains one of Selena's most beloved singles. When Selena played the Houston Astrodome in 1994 and mixed a number of these songs with her own refried medley of disco classics ("Last Dance," "The Hustle," "On the Radio"), she was living directly within the Tejano pop moment. The same medley shows up on "Anthology," but in place of 61,000 screaming fans (the same number who visited her casket when it was on public display at a convention center), we get drum machines. Her performance is still stunning; only now, all we're left with is a manufactured memory. SALON | May 20, 1998 Josh Kun writes about popular music for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.