(And the best die young: The short life and death of Selena Quintanilla-Perez – Copyright© 2009 – cyberaxis.wordpress.com. Selena, its on.)
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 (now the corporately-branded Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi): Selena Quintanilla-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.
Avatar Masquerading as Star and 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.” Selena has through fate and circumstance, become the symbol of our joy and pain clarified and bottled like an essence; stunningly potent in its essence and guises. (Original Copyright: George Gongora, Corpus Christi Caller Times, TEXAS)
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 of it 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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This is the paradox of Selena and Selenidad : a collective apprehension of what had been, through what had just been lost – a phenomenon Deborah Paredez describes as “the performance of memory.” Over two decades later, it shows no signs of abating. Perhaps there is a tale somewhere in here that still has to be told in a time and space bigger and a bit more removed from what has just unfolded. Perhaps we are just be too close to the rupture of Selena’s death to comprehend anything beyond what we tell little children.
We will try and keep things in perspective, cognizant of the time and place of her story’s unfolding; but even after factoring in the cult of personality and inevitable worship of celebrities, there is still something about Selena that transcends the American cultural froth: the sweet little girl who stumbled upon stardom on a fated lark and the multitudes who all of a sudden realized what they had – only to lose it in the very next moment. Against such charms there are no talismans, personal or otherwise, even amongst the most hard-bitten; the terminally jaded. Those in doubt should read the accounts of other musicians’ encounters with Selena to get a sense of what this is all about – what Selena was all about. This may, perhaps be the nub of the story: octave pyros and belters are born every minute, but melters are much harder to find.
To be clear, Selena was a star, long before mainstream America and the world, by extension, 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 variably successful albums under her belt. However it was this posthumous album, a cross-over masterpiece, that show-cased the seminal brilliance and precocity 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.
Part Gift to the World and Part Unplanned Elegy: Selena Quintanilla’s “Dreaming of You Album” (which would turn out to be her last) is absolutely heartbreaking. And the reason for this has as much to do with what the world lost as who the world lost. This (in a word) is the nub of the Selena Quintanilla story. Text Copyright: Cyberaxis.Wordpress. Photo Copyright: EMI Latin Records.
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