![]() She also proved she could sing the deepest form of ranchera and make it her own. Selena prepared for the new market by working hard on her Spanish - in early interviews she responded to Spanish questions in English, but by the 1990s she was comfortably fluent, though she still joked about occasional mistakes. The key was her R&B-flavored version of cumbia, the Afro-Colombian style that had become popular with dancers on both sides of the border. The 1990 album “Ven Conmigo” marked Selena’s first significant crossover, hitting not only in Texas but in Mexico. Quintanilla arranged and produced all the recordings and wrote almost all the songs, often in partnership with the backing vocalist Pete Astudillo, and they rarely brought in any outside musicians. That sense of family grounded Selena’s most spectacular performances in a reassuring warmth and stability, and as she explored a growing range of styles, it kept her sound impressively cohesive. on bass, and when she married the band’s guitarist, a Van Halen-style shredder named Chris Perez, they moved into a house next door to her parents. Selena’s older siblings formed a solid rhythm section, sister Suzette on drums and brother A.B. It helped that she was part of a family band: Her father, Abraham Quintanilla, had been part of a popular Tejano vocal group in the early 1960s and raised his children to continue and amplify his dream. No matter how dazzling or famous she became, she always seemed approachable and candid, and easily laughed at herself. That mix of brilliance and normalcy created a special bond between Selena and her fans. Then, in an instant, she drops the mask, smiling and even laughing, reminding the audience they are all watching and enjoying this together - and then she again is in agony, her fist beating her chest, murmuring the final words, “como me duele,” “how it hurts me.” You can see it in a live performance of one of her defining songs, “Como la Flor.” She begins by emphasizing the heartache of the lyric, slowly drawing out the lines about a lover leaving, her face contorted in pain. Selena combined virtuosic skills with a kind of magical ordinariness. ![]() ![]() Whether she was singing hot R&B, bouncy cumbia, rootsy accordion conjunto music or her own genre-busting fusions, she looked and sounded completely at home. The previous month she had been named best female vocalist at the Tejano Music Awards - an honor she would win for nine of the next 10 years - and if her records focused on the light Spanish-language show-band pop typical of that genre, her live shows demonstrated an uncanny ability to assimilate any style that attracted her. And everything she sang came from her own background and experience.īarely 16 years old, Selena was breaking out as the new queen of the Tejano scene. While not altogether wrong, that interpretation misses an essential fact about Selena’s career: She had been crossing stylistic, linguistic, ethnic and geographical boundaries since she began singing professionally at age 9, constantly expanding both her music and her audiences. A regular theme of these projects is that the young star was struck down while recording her first full English-language album, right on the verge of crossover success. ![]() In the quarter century since her death, Selena’s legend has continued to grow, fed by reissues and remixes, numerous books, a film starring Jennifer Lopez and now a bio-series from Netflix, which debuts Friday. Growing up in Houston in the 1990s, everyone knew of Selena, the Tejano star whose death at age 23 in 1995 catapulted her to national fame. Neither sister needed to mention the name of the song’s singer. “This is so unfair!” Solange protested, before answering: “No Me Queda Mas.” First she asked for her sibling’s favorite Diana Ross film, then a choice some readers might have found more puzzling: “ ‘No Me Queda Mas’ or ‘I Could Fall in Love’”? In 2017 Beyoncé spoke with Solange for Interview magazine, and popped a couple of questions about her sister’s tastes.
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