Selena Soundtrack Released

Selena “The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” (EMI Latin)

The push to turn Selena into a mainstream pop artist continues with the soundtrack for Warner Bros.’ biopic “Selena.”

The album cashes in on the momentum started by 1995’s “Dreaming of You,” Selena’s first posthumous album that included four English-language songs intended for her much-touted crossover effort.

Using previously unreleased demos recorded in the early ‘90s, “Selena” is ideal for folks smitten by her innocuous pop ballads, “Dreaming of You” and “I Could Fall in Love,” both included here.

But like the “Dreaming of You” CD, the soundtrack panders to a constituency removed from her faithful Latin audience. Two more ballads, “Where Did the Feeling Go?” and “Only Love,” erase the vocal sassiness that was this Texan’s trademark. Drowning in keyboards and strings, both songs are pop radio fodder that could have been sung by anybody from Tiffany to Donna Lewis.

A bit more of her personality is salvaged on three dance cuts, including the pulsating “Is It the Beat?”, originally recorded in 1990, and two disco medleys from her 1995 Houston Astrodome concert. The medleys - “I Will Survive/ Funkytown” and “Last Dance/The Hustle/On the Radio” - showcase how Selena embraced the late ‘70s radio tunes of her adolescence.

You can hear her affinity for this material during the “Last Dance” combo. She begins the snippet of Donna Summer’s staple quietly and slowly works her voice into a growling simmer. Ditto for “On the Radio,” during which Selena transforms herself from Tejano queen to dance diva.

The rest of the soundtrack is a mixed bag: A sappy, multi-artist “We Are the World”-styled tribute titled “Viviras Selena,” a perfunctory live medley of Selena’s recognizable cumbias and the inexplicable inclusion of “A Boy Like That,” the hip-hop dance cut originally featured in 1996’s benefit album, “The Songs of West Side Story.”

The logic behind this seemingly disparate collection of songs is actually quite simple - market saturation. Using the attention provided by the film’s release as free promotion, EMI Latin is hoping it’ll score another multiplatinum success. Call it posthumous career marketing at its savviest.