And the best die young: The short life and death of Selena Quintanilla-Perez

Shooting Star ..... One to the Universe: The late Selena Quintanilla-Perez April 16, 1971 - March 31, 1995. The symbolism in this pic is stunning "Como La Flor".

March remains the cruelest of all months;  and the 31st,  the day time stood still  in a space so surreal it deserves its own  time-line.

Flashback reminiscent of November 22, 1963:  It’s  a little after 1.05pm and the news that would rock Corpus Christi and the world begins to fan out of  Memorial Medical Center:  Selena Quintanella-Perez, the celebrated  Queen of Tejano has just died after being shot by  the former president of her fan club.  Incongruity: Selena the most loving person in the world had just died following the most hate-filled encounter. The collective mind could not wrap itself around this. It still cannot.

And so it has been with this tragedy, that the majority of us  have been  condemned to start the story of Selena at the end with a casket,  instead of  the irrepressible little girl who would transfix the world with her song.

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“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain… Or so says the legend.”
— Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds)

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To be clear, Selena,  was a star, long before mainstream America and the world discovered her. By the time  Selena’s  cross-over opus,  “Dreaming of You”, was released posthumously on 7/18/95,  she already had about eight successful albums under her belt.  However it was this posthumous album, a cross-over masterpiece, that show-cased the seminal brilliance and precociousness of  the fallen chanteuse. But as Newsweek’s Joshua Alston astutely points out, the “cross-over” characterization was a bit provincial and misleading because Selena had already crossed-over into Mexico with her Tejano Music – a spruced up version of Conjunto music.

Listening to the album  “Dreaming of you” is absolutely heartbreaking. The lilting single “I Could Fall In Love With You“ belongs in the hall of fame of timeless pop classics. It’s beat, sinuous and insistent beneath the airy vocal and layered instrumentation, propels the song like the muscles of a python. Play it on a long Sunday drive and you will find it  is perfectly capable of imprinting itself on the mind like a subdurally engraved tattoo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WTMESWDWMA&eurl

Selena’s cover of the old Mariachi torch song “Tu Solo Tu” on this album completes the circuit that made her spark as an artist.  If “Tu Solo Tu” represents the roots of Selena’s music, then “I could fall in love with you” represents the branches that came out of the trunk of Tejano Music;  a genre that numbers her as one of its pioneers.  I cannot listen to  “Tu Solo Tu“, which means “You Only You” without getting chills. It’s  vibe is as ancient as the rivers that course ‘neath the Texas landmass. And Selena’s voice absolutely electrifies this old classic.  If I was a dowser, this is where my rod would go absolutely nuts because here, ‘neath this very spot are the nether wells that gave Selena’s sound its power and magic.

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters
Of Life’s longing for itself.”
(The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran)

The one genre we wish Selena could have tackled by way of further tribute to the past would have been the sweet music of the  trios as in “La Bella Epoca De Los Trios”. This is the old music in the tradition of Los Tres Reyes, Los Panchos, Trio Les Tres Ases and Trio Los Tres Diamantes. Her sultry voice in combination with low-fi acoustic instrumentation would have been amazing. But we digress.

While “Dreaming of You” gave more than subtle hints of Selena’s musical precocity when it came to her astounding grasp of the Anglo-American pop genres, her discography proves how genuinely bilingual she was as an artist. The latter is no mean feat because not every artist pulls it off with critical and commercial success. “I Could Fall In Love With You” is as authentic as any of her Mariachi torch songs. The power of her Spanish songs came from the old part of her soul. The newer stuff was the musical equivalent of fusion cuisine. And it brimmed with everything she had ingested as a kid from Cumbia, Mariachi and Rancheras to pop, RB and reggae. Her father says she immersed herself in everything.

“Como La Flor”  and other reggae inflected tunes  (without the DJ chant) prefigured the Latin preoccupation with reggae dancehall that would spawn Reggaeton; a commercially vibrant genre that would take the Latin music scene by storm by the turn of the millenium.

Not a Sparrow Falls to the Ground: Noone grieves alone when it comes to the untimely death of this princess.  This Queen. But what is it that makes the death of Selena so deep and so wrenching even for people who knew her only tangentially through her music? Hold that question, because the answer is as rooted in the person of Selena as the roots of that proverbial tree are rooted in the earth.

“You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
(Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

Como La Flor: Selena was an undeniable beauty in a sub-culture equally beholden to beauty. But her beauty was not of the skin-deep, porcelain variety. Au contraire it was firmly rooted in the earthy sensibility of the girl next door with the dazzling smile. Physically,  her beauty had the hint  of every-woman from the  Spanish Mami to the Afro-Asiatic ingenue. (Yes, there was more than a hint of the Thai vixen in her sumptuous  features.) She held a coveted spot in the emerging pantheon of beauty celebrated bybeauties as diverse as Aishwarya Rai and Angelina Jolie. She personified a convergence point on Professor Northrop’s  undifferentiated esthetic continuum;  all while being the uber curvaceous  bombshell with a heart of gold. Herein may be the eternal pinch: The story of the shooting star who remained as approachable as the girl next door.

“They are the sons and daughters
Of Life’s longing for itself.”
(Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

“Talent, raw undeniable talent”
(Before the Music Dies)

Selena personified the talent celebrated in the the documentary “Talent, raw undeniable talent”. She was the real thing from day one. Says Latin music critic, Enrique Fernandez: “This was not some sexy babe groomed by a record company.” Fernandez was being interviewed by People Magazine’s Bill Hewitt for the article “Before Her Time,” – a title which spoke as much of her musical  precocity as of her untimely passing. Bill Hewitt, says when Selena first sang at age six, her father immediately knew what he had; a voice that was endowed with perfect pitch and timing. Although lacking the five octave range of say a Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston, it had something their  voices didn’t have; a malty texture with contralto stylings that have minted many a star.  Norah Jones has it. Sarah Vaughn had it by the silly buckets.   Listen to “Tu Solo Tu” for a  good measure of this.  Like Jones’ and Vaughn’s,  Selena’s voice was infused with an acousticity that gave it an irresistible allure.

Grief Most Unbearable
(The aftermath of Selena’s passing)

Yolanda Saldivar: The subject of Yolanda Saldivar will, in time, be dealt with not because of some prurient interest in tragedy or infamy. No, the subject of Saldivar will be dealth with because, as the makers of the movie Selena explained to her father Abraham Quintanilla, the story of Selena would never be complete without at least a cursory look at the woman who pulled the trigger at the Days Inn on Navigation Blvd.  Yolanda Saldivar, at the very least, deserves the forensic treatment of a criminal who got caught up in the events of March 31st.

The task is fraught with danger similar to the scientist who becomes overly obsessed with his subject or the exorcist who becomes tormented by the very demons he is trying to exorcise.  And hovering above this risky enterprise is the real danger of glorifying that which deserves neither glorification nor renown. The zone of forensic treatment exists with within narrow compass.  I feel up to the challenge. Refusing to write about Yolanda Saldivar would amount to affirmation by omission. And giving her more attention than she deserves would play into the disease that led Selena’s death, not to mention  attenuating the 30 year sentence of a woman who no longer has a life except what she tries to suck through the long proboscis of a  parasite. As strange synchronicity would have it Yolanda Saldivar will be eligible for parole on April  Fools Day in 2025. Fortunately by then the trauma and memory of Selena would have attenuated somewhat. Be that as it may, there will always be elements of the press and gawky public that will follow her and perhaps inadvertently shower her with attention she does not deserve. That fact of life is just as true on accident-prone freeways as in the hyper-mediated space we live in.

Yolandar Saldivar, who is currently imprisoned in Mountain View unit at Gatesville, has filed several appeals against her conviction alleging errors in her trial process. She now represents in such legal proceedings.

Please Note: I will post more on the life and death of Selena as time allows. Meanwhile, please read  the “verisimilitudinal” account by Nick Joe Patoski; a most appropos read, with each anniversary of  Selena’s death. And while you are at it, check out  “Selena – Como La Flor” by the same author.

A school room video tutorial on Tejano Music by yours truly: Here is video primer on Tejano Music priced more for its documentary value and the way it “unvarnishedly” (coinage ours) projected the unpretentious star than historical exhaustiveness. THIS, my friends is the Selena Corpus Christi and the whole world came to love.

She was a flower. She was a song.

Here: A gritty,  kitchen table tribute: As I was researching material for this post, I came across Michelle Rukny’s  acapella rendition of “Tu Solo Tu“ by Selena on Youtube.  A-mazing. Electrifying is all I can say. Unfortunately the clip doesn’t play all the way through:

P. S. – The Selena Quintanilla Perplex: There is a rip-tide of emotion surrounding the death of Selena that is quite quite stunning in its breadth and depth. Fourteen years after her passing, the  grief keeps flowing as if from a bottomless well. The memorials keep growing.  The the blogs and forum postings have been very instructive.

Interesting note: Some of the teens who grieve Selena’s death today were not even born when she was shot and killed. The remainder were toddlers. It’s as if the grief has been passed on via an imprinting process across generations;  the imprinting of the tragedy that occured on March 31st 1995. On this massive  scale the phenomenon can only described and grasped in terms of what happens when someone in the family dies.  Yes, Selena was family; family as much to her flesh and blood as to the people  she did not even know. For me personally, the Corpus Christi newscast and video of her funeral linked to this post is just too difficult to watch. So I skip it most of the time.

A non-descript ad photo, now associated with an unspeakable tragedy. The Day's Inn at 901 Navigation Blvd., Corpus Christi, TX. This gauche image now has something in common with the most haunting place in down-town Dallas. (See semi-panoramic of Dealey Plaza below)

The reaction to this blog posting has been equally instructive. I will not go into the  statistical details, suffice it to say that they have consistently trounced those of posts I thought would garner more interest by virtue of the their more current newsworthiness. (You can see evidence of the post’s ascendancy in the order of interest under “Top Posts” on the cyberaxis.wordpress.com home page here).  While other posts experience occasional weekly surges, the Selena post remains a perennial favorite with the most page-views overall. It remains on the top of the list during most weeks, with astronomic surges in March and April. What a turn for a post which came together off the cuff in a Starbucks coffee shop late one Sunday afternoon.

I am thinking of visiting Corpus Christi sometime in the near future to vibe out the place Selena called home and the  Days Inn at 901 N. Navigation Blvd (Room 158) where she took her last steps.  I have been to Dealey Plaza folks and  know what tragedies of this magnitude can do to the energy of a place.) I will post reports  here, if and when that happens.

The most haunted place in all of Dallas: Dealey Plaza on a deceptively sunny day. Anyone who thinks that tragedy, historical or otherwise does not warp the energy of a place ought to visit Dealey Plaza ... or to talk to an empath.

Appendices:

An Unsung Ode to Selena Quintanilla-Perez (1971 – 1995)

My Story (A heartfelt story by a latter-day fan)

copyright© 2009 cyberaxis.wordpress.com

Caveat: This article is a work-in-progress.  So changes and additions are gonna be made on the fly. So keep checking back, and don’t be dismayed if what you read before has been replaced by something else. It’s the nature of the process.

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