The sisterhood of divas

Female pop stars who attain the attributes of goddesses -- emblematic names, signature fragrances, the floating hair of Botticelli’s “Venus” -- tend to share a few qualities. They are athletic vocalists, usually with multi-octave ranges, who can hold a note longer than most magicians can stay submerged in water. Their signature songs blend romantic axioms with the more current language of self-help. Their music is frequently dismissed as banal, yet often helps regular folk contemplate profundities, at weddings or funerals, or when a baby is born.

These traits link Whitney to Mariah to Shania to Celine to Faith to Beyonce to Christina to Alicia, although each has her own strengths and quirks. But something subtler also connects them. Musically, they’re border jumpers. On the surface, they epitomize pop banality, but they regularly defy their home genres, blithely disregarding musical rules that hem in more admired (and usually male) pop practitioners. Whitney Houston set the template for this role by turning a country hit, Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” into a smash that redefined crossover R&B.;

The mainstream’s pop goddesses also blur lines on the level of identity. Many are biracial. Celine Dion is obviously bilingual. All pop stars are mandated to continually remodel themselves, but few do so as dramatically as Mariah Carey, who fled innocence (and Tommy Mottola) to become hip-hop’s super-sexy honey. Christina Aguilera’s been a teen sweetie, a sex radical and a retro vamp. Beyonce, one suspects, hasn’t even begun to show us her thousand faces.

More trend-focused dance-floor queens -- the ones who follow in Madonna’s boot steps -- turn their makeovers into performances. For them, style comes first, and feeling flows from it. The goddesses take us inside the process, their songs chronicling how it feels to change from within. Their music is all about becoming bigger and better, with motivational lyrics, surging semi-operatic melodies and churchy rhythms. They show us how, as Oprah says, to run toward our best.

Chat shows, women’s magazines and chick lit belong to the same world, where women rule -- and struggle. As theorist Laura Kipnis has pointed out, “Femininity in its current incarnation . . . is built on an underlying sense of female inadequacy.” Pop goddesses represent women’s constant fight to keep fulfilling their exhaustingly inexhaustible potential.

So, it’s no shock that the two new goddess offerings commanding the charts have been packaged as transformations. Dion is “Taking Chances” on her eighth studio album; on her third, Alicia Keys is finally, truly presenting herself “As I Am.”

In reality, neither album deviates much from what these women have previously accomplished. Keys continues to develop her warm, contemplative approach to hip-hop R&B.; Dion, celebrating the end of her long Las Vegas run, employs some new producers to go beyond ringing the rafters but remains most convincing at full blast.

Experimentation pays off for Keys, not on the rockish outings with John Mayer and Linda Perry that she’s been emphasizing in interviews, but on the ones where she turns back toward the themes that have served her best. Her great subject is the unsettling swirl of unresolved romance; although precocious, Keys understands the teen heart, her thoughtfulness and skill the perfect foils for goose bumps and hot blood.

Although she shows off her sisterliness on the sing-along “Superwoman” and sobs seriously through the hit “No One,” Keys wasn’t made for grand pronouncements. As she continues to mature, she would be wise to hang on to that teenage feeling of promise and uncertainty.

On the Jack Splash productions “Teenage Love Affair” and “Wreckless Love,” Keys revisits the sweet folly of adolescence with the lighter heart of someone who’s survived it. “I Need You,” which sounds a little like a John Legend outtake, builds to a dense flurry of sounds suggesting connubial bliss. And the breathy “Like You’ll Never See Me Again,” which has been compared to Prince but actually recalls two other 1980s synth popsters -- Janet Jackson and Berlin -- makes the kind of romantic demands that only young lovers and soap opera characters would consider reasonable.

While Keys is still most effective courting life’s elusive what-ifs, Dion remains the queen of the declarative statement, and “Taking Chances” rumbles with them. It may have been a risk for Dion, who rarely writes her own material, to work with new pals including former Evanescence guitarist Ben Moody and R&B; all-pro Ne-Yo, and to let an old one, Aldo Nova, persuade some tentative rocking out. But these collaborators all brought their vision of Celine into the studio with them, and her thespian glory still rules the day.

With her tragic sense of phrasing and her perfect command of the vocal throb, Dion is truly pop’s operatic heroine, except that unlike Carmen or Butterfly, she never dies. Her emotionalism is huge, yet somehow not daunting; her slightly awkward physical presence adds to her approachability. Singing about passion and survival, Dion connects them to ordinary life. Her performances show how much work it takes to sing well, just as her songs reflect on how much energy it takes to love.

To do this, Dion needs songs that demand heavy lifting. Perry comes through for her on “Taking Chances.” Collaborating with Keys, hit maker Perry leads the young star away from herself, toward platitudes. But her two songs on “Taking Chances” run on melodrama that feeds Dion’s strengths.

“My Love” starts as a whisper in a chilly marital bedroom and slowly builds into a cry of moral righteousness; Dion reads it like “Hamlet.” Then there’s “New Dawn,” a full-on gospel number that mentions Jesus but ultimately has room for only one divine source. “I am woman!” Dion clamors. “A mountain I will climb!” Somewhere, Helen Reddy is quietly cursing; Dion has stolen her calm feminist statement and made it into myth.

The pop goddess lineage is a flexible one, changing with each new generation.

Keys, a hip-hop baby whose musicianship and hipster credibility help her step out of the women’s lounge and into the realm of “real” (i.e. male) musicians, goes several steps beyond Dion in updating the goddess for post-feminist high achievers. Unlike Dion, who’s made a lifetime commitment, Keys may someday go beyond the drama of self-realization and into uncharted territory.

That won’t be a loss, because there’s always a new goddess in the wings. This week, Jordin Sparks, the latest “American Idol,” takes her first official turn in the role. Her debut album, “Jordin Sparks” (in stores Tuesday), is a friendly outing, steered by star production teams such as Bloodshy & Avant and Stargate; it’s not the intriguing country-soul-Broadway amalgam her “Idol” performances hinted at, but that’s OK -- she’s a teen and she sounds right doing teen pop.

Deep into the album, though, there’s a ballad called “God Loves Ugly” written by Christa Black, with whom Sparks once toured, backing Christian pop star Michael W. Smith. It’s the kind of song that will make many cringe and just as many weep. A story of, yes, magical transformation due to the love of a good man (or God or inner self -- or all of those, in no particular order), “God Loves Ugly” builds quietly, like a cloud getting ready to rain. Sparks approaches it with a show-tune lover’s sense of distance; she shows a glimmer of self-consciousness amid the tears. Who knows? Maybe Sparks will grow to be a goddess we haven’t heard from yet.

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ann.powers@latimes.com