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VIVA THE DIVAS!
WITH LUSH BALLADS AND SOME AMAZING VOCAL VIRTUOSITY, WOMEN SINGERS ARE UPENDING THE OLD BAD-BOY WORLD OF POPULAR MUSIC
RICHARD CORLISS

You will find no mosh pit at a Celine Dion concert. Police dogs could patrol the place without detecting a hint of incense, marijuana or egregious body odor. Few safety pins impale the eyebrows of those attending. Even at her concert last week in Madison Square Garden--a building where a riot recently erupted at a boxing match, in a town not noted for its decorum--Dion's New York fans were as well behaved as churchgoers. And indeed they were true believers in the movable Cathedral of Celine. Bathed in this soft rapture, one member of the faithful occasionally exclaimed, "We love you, Celine!," but so discreetly that the star couldn't hear him. It was a prayer that needed to be expressed to the deity in the limelight. No reply required.

At first the 28-year-old French-Canadian chanteuse seemed to be having more fun than her fans. Sporting a phosphorescent vanilla suit and a severe Quebecoif, Dion raced up the steep ramps onstage, executed some expertly snaky hand gestures and did a decent Chuck Berry duck walk while wrapping her wondrously cruel mouth and powerful pipes around the tunes that made her a star first in Canada, then France, then around the world. Still, the Garden crowd responded to her theatrical passion with an almost too muted reverence.

Finally, halfway through the fifth song--All By Myself, the Eric Carmen torching of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2--Dion shattered the devotional quiet. By pushing the last note of the phrase "Don't wanna be all by myself anymore" up an octave, putting a scalding rasp into it and finding the perfect pitch for rage, she transformed the song's silky sulkiness into an ecstasy of agony. A vocal trick, yes, but an effective one, for at that moment the Garden theater jolted to raucous pop-concert life. It became a place of cheers and applause--aural gratitude for a pop diva supreme.

Diva means goddess. The dictionary definition is more modern: "an operatic prima donna." Let's fiddle a little with those words. "Operatic": note the strenuous, hyperemotional, aria-like feel to many pop ballads. "Prima donna": remove its suggestion of imperious temperament and translate it literally as first lady. Voila! Celine Dion or Gloria Estefan, Whitney or Mariah, Madonna or Enya, Toni Braxton or Tina Arena, Annie Lennox or Alanis Morissette, Miwa Yoshida or Faye Wong. They come from the U.S., of course, but also from French and English Canada, from Cuba, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Japan and China. In every country, in any language: la diva.

Connecting with my audience is as important as breathing. --Celine Dion

There's no ignoring divadom these days. If you don't listen much to pop music, you will still hear the top thrushes at the movies. Dion chants Because You Loved Me in the middle and at the end of the Robert Redford-Michelle Pfeiffer Up Close and Personal. Wong covered the Cranberries hit Dreams in the 1994 Hong Kong film Chungking Express. Whitney Houston and a flock of divas made the CD of Waiting to Exhale as big a hit as the film. The insistence of the melodic lines in these songs, and the persistence of their air play, makes them part of the sound track of modern life. If you don't hear these tunes on the elevator, you may well be humming them there.

And if you avoid the movie house, divas will find you at home. Billions of TV viewers watched Dion provide the climax to the Atlanta Games' opening ceremony with a hymn to the Olympic spirit, The Power of the Dream, by David Foster, Linda Thompson and Kenny ("Babyface") Edmonds, backed by a 300-member gospel choir. Another billion or so tuned in this Sunday, aiming to see Estefan close the Games with the anthemic Reach; she wrote it with Diane Warren, who has composed nearly every recent big ballad (including Because You Loved Me) that was not authored by either Foster or Babyface.

These slots simply had to go to divas. Guys can put across songs of misery and destruction; inspirational paeans are girl stuff. So are role-model personas consistent with the idealism the Olympics try to embody, or at least sell. What male singer could deliver the first song's potent, potentially risible message ("And since the dawn of man/ The strength of just 'I can'/ Has brought together people of all nations") with Dion's strong voice, clear heart and straight face? Who but Estefan, brave survivor of a 1990 bus crash that broke her back, could give such autobiographical grit to her song of resilience? "So I'll go the distance this time," she intones, "Seeing more the higher I climb." And the huge audience soars with her.

Divas can't climb much higher. They nestle at or near the top of their country's music charts. Some, like Dion, Houston and Mariah Carey--not to mention, for the moment, Canada's crack-voiced outlaw diva Alanis Morissette--have been on the Top 10 lists in Europe, the Americas and the Pacific Rim simultaneously. More important, most of these women are damn fine singers. They are a link between the great voices of the past (think of Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Merman, Edith Piaf) and the ears of people who can't get attuned to the howling self-pity of much contemporary rock but aren't ready to give up on pop music.

The first record I bought was Stevie Wonder, the orange album. --Celine Dion

It's a small miracle--cynics would say a miracle of marketing by canny record executives--that the divas have flourished. For 40 years in Anglo-American pop, which sets music fashions for the rest of the world, women have been an endangered species. Elvis, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, these were the ones who mattered. Rock's primal image was of a man and his guitar, the tortured satyr and his magic lute. Women were allowed to scream in the audience or maybe sing backup. Even today, girls are no more encouraged to pick up a Stratocaster than to pilot an F-16. They are expected to play only one instrument: the voice.

All right, fine. Women would become vocal virtuosos--with a comic touch, like Bette Midler, or in the florid, world-weary style of France's Catherine Ribeiro, or with glances back to the glamour of Piaf and Dietrich, like Germany's brilliant Ute Lemper. That women also became global pop superstars is thanks to Whitney Houston (and her mentor at Arista Records, Clive Davis). It was an old recipe--great chops, exotic looks and a clever choice of material--that had served Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Abbey Lincoln and Houston's cousin Dionne Warwick. But in the harsh prevailing winds of mid-ྌs rap and heavy metal, Houston was a welcome spring breeze. Her delicacy of phrasing made songs like Saving All My Love for You and The Greatest Love of All easy listening in the best sense. Her prom-queen glamour made her an ideal star of the early video era, an antidote to Cyndi Lauper's goofy-girl atavism and Madonna's bad-girl sass.

Her first album, Whitney Houston, sold 10 million copies to become the all-time best-selling debut. The follow-up, Whitney, was the first set by a female to enter the U.S. Billboard chart at No. 1. Her 1992 cover of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You reigned as the No. 1 single in Billboard for 14 weeks; its album, The Bodyguard, has sold 33 million units.

I'm not in competition with anybody but myself. My goal is to beat my last performance. --Celine Dion

Houston has retained her eminence, if not pre-eminence, while curtailing her output: she has released less than a single regular album's worth of songs, only 10, since 1990. But her example and her relative quiescence spurred a dozen divas-in-waiting. Many noted the structure of Houston's big hits--a slow-tempo devotional tune that escalates from the foreplay of whispers to the explosive orgasm of wails and whoops--and made the mistake of imitating it. (Houston made that error too.) Dion's early English-language albums are almost touching in their fidelity to the Whitney formula. It took her a while to realize she could relax on record.

The most successful Whitneyesque singer is Mariah Carey. Like Houston, she'll mix ballads with synthesized dance music; she's a handsome woman with a video flair; she has a patron in Tommy Mottola, boss of her record company who is also her husband. Carey has even outsold Houston in the ྖs, partly because she releases albums at a busier pace.

One big difference: Houston sings straight soprano with some church inflection; Carey is a coloratura. She could even be called a cubist, for she appraises nearly every note in every song from a dozen or more angles. In When I Saw You from her current Daydream CD, Carey breaks the word knew into an amazing 26 separate notes (this is only an estimate: we played these four seconds over and over, and got up to 26 just before we went mad). Her jazzy riffs suggest demon virtuosity, but it could also be musical browsing. Maybe Carey can't decide which interpretation of a phrase is the right one, so she throws them all into the mix.

Carey knows many things. Tina Arena knows one big thing: how to duplicate and update the lighter pop vocabulary. An Australian who has sung publicly since she was five, Arena has an easy authority as vocalist and songwriter; she's got a cool-teen voice to match her rock-easy compositions, which are so infectious that six-year-olds would learn them instantly and so familiar that you might think they were big hits a decade ago (they're all new, all hers). When Arena gets precision and voltage into the songs--Heaven Help My Heart, Greatest Gift, Standing Up--she sounds like a kid sister to Elaine Paige, superb star of London musicals, who introduced such instant standards as Don't Cry for Me Argentina (from Evita), Memory (from Cats) and a quite different Heaven Help My Heart (from Chess).

Arena has moved to Los Angeles because, like everyone else, she wants to be an American star. Well, not quite everyone. Japanese soul-jazz sensation Miwa Yoshida, lead singer of the band Dreams Come True, still makes albums in her native language. But she cut her first solo set, Beauty and Harmony, in New York City with some top American sidemen. Faye Wong summoned Scotland's Cocteau Twins to write and produce two cuts on her CD, Annoyed, a spooky blend of Canto-Pop and lollipop.

Thrushes from the West, like Carey, Houston and Dion, make music that is meant to be liked. Most of their music is not just middle of the road; it tiptoes on the white line in the middle of the middle of the road. And in social norms, the pop diva adheres to the proper side of the gender split in music. She is expected to be a sister before a lover; the operative slur word is "nice." Pop is the boarding school where the good girls live. Rock is the shooting gallery where the naughty boys hang out.

Somewhere between these polar opposites there should be a place for an outlaw diva. She can do some of the cool-guy things: write songs about malaise and disorientation, play a harmonica, take herself tremendously seriously, sell 16 million copies of her first big CD. Why, she could be Alanis Morissette--the anti-Whitney, the pariah Mariah, the gorier Gloria, the mean Celine.

Anyway, that's how the 22-year-old comes across on a first listen of the Jagged Little Pill album. Morissette's songs sound aggressive, grudging, desperate. Her alto lurches among the octaves, from growl to shriek. A typical phrase will end in a gasp, as if one of the emotional inferiors in her songs had suddenly retaliated by pressing thumb and forefinger on her windpipe. The voice of Sinead O'Connor, you imagine, in the mind of Patti Smith.

But Morissette is not that simple. A former teen star in her native Canada, she's smart enough to give her choruses sing-along melodies--the likely contribution of co-writer Glen Ballard, who formerly produced Wilson Phillips, the trio of cool-harmonizing, second-generation pop stars. In the perkier tunes (You Learn, Head over Feet), the singer overdubs tight harmonies that might have come from Wilson Phillips. And that is Morissette's dirty little secret: inside her edgy plaints are craft and a yen to please. She's a mainstream diva in spite of herself.

Nearly every strain of divadom can be found in Canada: Dion, Morissette, the bell-voiced New Age sorceress Loreena McKennitt, the art-folksy Sarah MacLachlan. There's another woman from the North who has invaded and conquered the foreign country known as country. Nashville is now the property of Shania Twain; so are the pop charts, in whose aerie Twain's CD, The Woman in Me, has resided for more than a year. The big lure was the album's first single, Any Man of Mine, a taunting feminist jest with fiddles and steel guitars and a pounding melody echoing Neil Young's Love Is a Rose.

But what catches the ear of any diva devotee is Twain's easy virtuosity. Attend to her reading of this verse: "Any man of mine'll say it fits just right/ When last year's dress is just a little too tight/ And anything I do or say, that'll be O.K./ When I have a bad hair day." The throaty intimacy, the smart selling of each phrase, the drawl of lightly ironic girl talk in "just a little too tight," the clear but not prissy enunciation--these are the signs of a true storyteller in song. And since she delivers the entire verse in one confident breath, Twain gets a free pass to diva country.

Like Twain, many female singers co-write their music. Many don't and are thus handicapped by pop's 30-year tyranny of singer-songwriters. Hey, if you don't write, you're not an artist. "Vocal interpreter" used to be an honorable job description--good enough for Ella, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, who wrote little of their own material. Now the epithet is often an insult. It conjures up images of a weekend karaoke performer.

All right, maybe Babyface and David Foster and Diane Warren aren't Gershwin and Stephen Foster and Harry Warren. But they can write good songs for good singers. These three composers all had a hand in Toni Braxton's fine Secrets CD--dusky, mellow, irresistibly commercial, like a grownup Tina Arena.

And there's plenty of other good music to record. Alison Krauss, a child fiddle prodigy from Illinois and later a world-class bluegrass singer with her band Union Station, became a star with her 1995 compilation, Now That I've Found You. The set puts Krauss's mountain-stream soprano on pretty display. She attacks, or rather caresses, standards from old R. and B. (the title song), gospel (the soul-lifting When God Dips His Pen of Love in My Heart) and the Paul McCartney catalog (an elfin I Will). Imagine--a singer with no gimmick but talent and a great, rangy taste in music.

I don't want a hit. I want a career. I want to sing all my life. --Celine Dion

Rock machismo is often just an acid flavor of the month: a hit, a burnout, a trivia question. But being a diva is a life's work. The Scottish Annie Lennox has been at it for 20 years, developing a husky voice and a gift for weaving a dramatic spell that is almost visual. Her 1995 Medusa album has 10 old and new songs written by others. The opening cut, No More "I Love You's," relies on Lennox's evocation of love's demons--"Desire, despair, desire, so many monsters"--and her conjuring up, in a mid-song monologue, of a little girl for whom these monsters come to life. A woman's bed of sad passion has telescoped into a child's bedroom fears at midnight.

The final number on Medusa is Paul Simon's 1973 Something So Right. In Lennox's gorgeous reworking, she answers the pessimism of No More "I Love You's" and completes the album's circle. "Some people never say the words I love you,/But like a child I'm longing to be told." Again a girl in a woman's supple voice, Lennox finds salvation foraging in a child's garden of cries from the heart. Lennox might be Piaf here--there's that spooky understanding of a lyric--but with the fever adjusted to room temperature.

Piaf is still an icon, both for her poignant life story and for her ability to hurdle emotion over the language barrier. But in the world market of the ྖs, when virtually every album with gigantic global sales is in some form of English, what's a diva to do? Cultivate her own garden, for the worldwide boom in CD sales means there are more people searching for something different. Morissette's album is bubble-gum music next to Tori Amos' Boys for Pele, with its forbiddingly opaque lyrics, a voice that runs amuck over the octaves and the famous inside photo of Amos with a suckling piglet at her breast. Yet the album has sold millions. Moral: You can't be too weird. You must be you.

That is the message attended to by singers who harbor nations within themselves. Enya, the Celtic lass whose ethereal soundscapes might have emanated from a very gentle UFO (the one, say, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), sings in Gaelic, English and Latin--the languages of family, school and church. Her melodies are so mellow as to seem downright shy, yet they are so popular that an entire genre of new music is known simply as Enya.

By that standard, the pop brand of Cuban-American music should probably be called Gloria. With time, the Estefan sound has grown full and wise, Latin rhythms accompanying rather than defining the melody. Estefan has also learned to write for her voice and disposition; on her new album, Destiny, she has taken her own advice. Reach--higher.

And Celine Dion has reached inside. The Falling into You CD, a supercharged superproduction, will yield perhaps half a dozen smasheroo singles, and it's a treat to hear her belt a song to bits. But a bigger piece of her heart can probably be found on D'eux (called The French Album outside Canada and France). There the girl from Quebec sings in her mother's language, and in a voice so ardent and discreet it might come from one of her fans at a concert. Murmuring like the heart just before sleeping, that voice summons the power and the glory of the diva.

--With reporting by Charles P. Alexander/Montreal