Rivera gives crazy a good name

Jenni Rivera

“Mi Vida Loca” (Fonovisa)

* * * 1/2

NOW that Gwen Stefani is more U.K. than O.C., it’s time to pass the Southern California pop-diva crown to its rightful owner, Long Beach native and bilingual banda queen Jenni Rivera. Rivera’s pop is the old-school kind, less Timbaland and Ryan Seacrest and more pop as in populist -- people’s music, or in her case, gente music, that speaks to the millions of Mexican Americans and Mexicans living in the U.S.

Rivera is best known for being one of the only women to belt narcocorridos, those flossy and trash-talking Mexican folk tales about drug runners and border bling that have come to dominate the world of Mexican regional music.

Instead of settling into submissiveness or flaunting her sexuality, she went gangsta on her own, lighting up cigars, bragging about fictitious drug fame and calling herself la malandrina (the bad girl), la chacalosa (the jackal girl) and la parrandera (the party girl), all the while paying tribute to foremothers such as Lucha Villa, Lola Beltran and even Diana Ross.

The move carried extra weight because of Rivera’s lineage: She belongs to the most important dynasty in contemporary U.S.-based Mexican music. Her corrido-singing dad, Pedro, started the Cintas Acuario indie label in 1987 that helped turn legendary growler Chalino Sanchez into the Tupac of the Mexican migrant circuit, and her corrido-singing little brother Lupillo is a Mexican regional megastar. (Rivera has a mini-empire of her own that now includes a cosmetics line and a real estate business.)

As a result, Rivera’s music has always been synonymous with the traditions she works against and the rules she breaks, a liberating stance for sure but one that in recent years has grown musically limiting. That all changes with “Mi Vida Loca,” her 12th studio album and by far her most versatile and revealing. (She’s holding a public album-release event Tuesday at Vault 350 in Long Beach.)

Rivera takes the cholo cliche for living the crazy life of gangs and turns it into a Mexican American feminist diary of personal and domestic struggle set to a sizzling banda score. For her, la vida loca is getting pregnant in high school, getting physically abused by husbands and raising her kids, as she sings it here, “Sin Capitan,” without a captain.

Speaking in English-sprinkled Spanish, she narrates the entire album with dramatic, raw confessionals about dignity and revenge, from an ugly court battle with her “first love” who told her to quit singing (“Mirame,” she tells him, “look at me now ... idiot”) to her mother’s failed attempts to have her aborted after her parents crossed the border (the song that follows is “Dejame Vivir” -- let me live).

Rivera’s voice has never sounded more commanding. She’s equally at home dodging dizzying clarinet twirls on “La Vida Loca 2” and soaring over the Old Mexico guitar trills and ‘50s blues shuffle of “Mariposa de Barrio,” christening herself “the butterfly of the ‘hood.” The song that’s bound to be Rivera’s new Latina girl power anthem, though, is the almost countryish “Dama Divina,” in which she boasts of not having the body of Salma Hayek, Thalia, Sofia Vergara or Beyonce (and jokes that she gets more beautiful after a few tequilas). That she wrote the song before getting her much-publicized liposuction earlier this year shouldn’t matter much to her female fans -- it’s the kind of joyous body-image roast that is never heard on Spanish-language radio.

Midway through “Mi Vida Loca,” Rivera covers the Gloria Gaynor disco staple “I Will Survive,” but she doesn’t have to. Her own stories, and her own songs, do all the testifying she’ll ever need.

*

One band that will never drag on

Ozomatli

“Don’t Mess With the Dragon” (Concord)

* * *

ALWAYS a dance band at its core, L.A.’s own Ozomatli has also woven political and cultural observations into its globe-spinning blend of Latin, rock, hip-hop, funk, Indian and Asian sounds with lyrics sung and rapped in English and Spanish.

The 10-piece group’s tirelessly percussive fourth studio album does reference New Orleans after Katrina in the resilient funky rap of “Magnolia Soul” and touches on the Iraq war with the beautifully sorrowful Spanish-language ballad “Violeta.” The dragon in the title track, however, is not any force of government or society but the travails of life that begin to preoccupy one’s mind as adulthood creeps in and theory is replaced by experience.

That’s not to say this collection is tame or apolitical, although it has a cosmopolitan polish that contrasts sharply with its storefront-level origins.

Ozo makes its kitchen-sink musical fusion feel seamless in any given number, with mashed-up grooves rolled out over plush beds of scratching, cowbells, timbales, horns, accordion and more. Still, “Dragon” can be dizzying in its sheer variety. It’s a mostly breathless 40 minutes, with “Violeta” the only break from the fast pace.

As for the dragon, well, it’s no surprise that Ozo’s advice -- in such numbers as the rock-flecked anthem “Can’t Stop” and the breezy pop-tinged “After Party” -- is to stay upbeat. The sentiment is in the sound: Be positive, no matter what life throws you.

Natalie Nichols

*

Duff takes a while to find her style

Hilary Duff

“Dignity” (Hollywood)

* * 1/2

KIDS grow up so fast these days, or at least they act that way. Maybe it’s the unrelenting competition from the Avrils and the Ashlees, but here is Hilary Duff, still shy of her 20th birthday, releasing her debut as an “adult” recording artist.

“Dignity” (in stores Tuesday) may get the kind of “oohs” and “aahs” that friends and relatives bestow on their little girl that day when she shows up in a dress, heels and makeup. But as often happens at that time, Duff doesn’t seem entirely comfortable and confident in her new image.

In her teen-pop years, the singer-actress showed an unremarkable voice but conveyed an unaffected personality. Here she seems a little lost and overwhelmed by the percolating dance settings and body-blow rock arrangements. The inappropriately languid vocal on the album-opening “Danger” immediately signals this disconnect between singer and song.

But as she tries out different approaches, Duff eventually finds some footing. Her dusky vocal on the down-tempo track “No Work All Play” is a convincing surprise, and she turns fast, tricky phrasing into a natural presence on the stalker putdown “Dreamer.”

Duff also sounds vibrant on “Never Stop” and “Between You and Me,” two of the five tracks produced by Chico Bennett and Richard Vission. Duff’s writing partnership with teen specialist Kara DioGuardi yields some grand hooks and fairly routine observations on romance, revenge, insecurity and identity, but it’s Bennett and Vission’s big buoyant, ABBA-honoring mega-pop tracks that give “Dignity” a memorable kick.

Richard Cromelin

*

‘Traffic, Weather,’ a pitch for radio

Fountains of Wayne

“Traffic and Weather” (Virgin)

* * *

HALF of the creative core of New York’s Fountains of Wayne, Adam Schlesinger has developed a lucrative sideline writing songs for movies about successful songwriters. Among his accomplishments: the title tune from “That Thing You Do!” and “Way Back Into Love,” the glorious piano ballad Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore collaborate on in “Music and Lyrics.” Yet with the exception of “Stacy’s Mom,” their 2003 ode to soccer-mom sexpots, the Fountains haven’t really infiltrated the Top 40 terrain so familiar to Schlesinger’s on-screen surrogates. Their rich discography is an item of cult worship.

On “Traffic and Weather,” FOW’s fourth full-length collection, Schlesinger and his partner Chris Collingwood -- the Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of power-pop -- sound as if they wouldn’t mind exchanging a little respect for a bit more fame. “Someone to Love” expertly mimics the dance-rock stomp of the Killers’ “Somebody Told Me”; “ ’92 Subaru” channels Cheap Trick’s “Surrender”; the dreamy “I-95” could be the Coldplay track Collingwood goofs on a guy for digging in “Someone to Love.”

Record geeks beyond repair, the songwriters still lace the more accessible material here with their trademark wit. But this time they’re aiming for both Stacy and her mom.

-- Mikael Wood