I wish Rivera did more songs backed by mariachi, because she could’ve easily become a modern-day Lola Beltrán or Lucha Villa. Also the name of a Telemundo novela that came out this year about her life. “The caterpillar has transformed/her pain into color,” she whispers. On this track, Jenni subdues her strong voz to match the swaying banda and look back at her extraordinary life, comparing her trajectory to that of a butterfly. It even memorably captures Rivera on the back cover of her CD walking down the red carpet in an elegant red dress while flashing the “Westside” hand sign. The 2007 Mi Vida Loca album is an underrated masterpiece, with spoken-word passages, disses to her haters, and shout-outs to her fans.
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“Gimme Tecate with salt and lime.” And they say Beyoncé knows how to throw shade… “Mariposa de Barrio” “Bitter champagne is for stuck-up hags,” Rivera cracks. Jenni always experimented with her sound, and here she combined banda with conjunto norteño to both celebrate women like her and trash fresas-the Mean Girls. The title -“Partier, Rebel, and a Nasty Girl”- says it all. Women weren’t supposed to drink and party! But Jenni didn’t GAF, and announced to the world that “The Bad Girls” were her homegirls, ¿y qué? The song has since become a classic, and even better is the video-long before body positivity became a thing, the zaftig Jenni gave much love to all the big girls with bad tattoos, and ridiculed those skinnier ones who dared talk trash on them. Jenni’s first famous song, it caused un escándalo among the tías in 1999 because she was glorifying loud, independent atrevidas who, in a previous era of corridos, would’ve been shot dead (see: “Rosita Olvírez” and “El Día de San Juan”). “I inherited a business/That would give me good money.” If only more families did the same-minus the drugs, of course! “Las Malandrinas” “When I turned 15/They didn’t give me a quinceañera,” Rivera roared. It’s a parody song, with a melody that sounds like Los Tigres del Norte’s “Pacas de a Kilo,” but Rivera upends female conventions even this early. “Nobody thought women should sing such songs, so I figured I would write one to show that we can.” But “The Jackal Woman” didn’t hit until 1999, after Pedro released it to the public. Jenni wrote this boast about a drug dealer’s daughter in 1994 as a response to the narcocorridos recorded in that era by her father, Pedro, the man who discovered Chalino Sánchez. Jenni’s music remains criminally underappreciated by Spanish-language music critics, let alone acknowledged by English-language writers. “La Diva de La Banda” could’ve been the Mexican-American Oprah. Rivera was one of the few celebrities I ever met who kept every promise she made during interviews-she created businesses for her daughters, a non-profit, and even a television show that ABC announced just two days before her death.
I was lucky enough to do two in-depth profiles of Rivera- a 2002 piece for OC Weekly, and a 2009 profile for Latina. If the American media knew more about Rivera before her death, they would’ve compared her to fellow singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell or Carole King instead of her fellow Mexican-American musical martyr, Selena. Younger Mexicans revered Jenni as their bard, the prima with the huevos to speak the truth. Older generations of Mexicans were shocked at such raw confessionals. She openly talked about the struggles in her life-domestic abuse, bad husbands, even her weight. Jenni hailed these ladies, and she did it mostly in the genre of banda sinaloense, the brass band music that only the strongest of singers can master.īut Jenni was no novelty act. It’s one that traditionally saw women relegated to either Madonna or objectified status, but Jenni upended this duality with songs that gladly cast mujeres as atrevidas-a Trump “nasty woman.” Women not subject to society’s standards, ladies as easy with a gulp of tequila or a punch to an ungrateful man as they were with a wink. The 43-year-old native of Long Beach, California, was already a living legend when she died, having succeeded in the macho world of corridos. While her fans have rightfully mourned ever since, the biggest tragedy was that Rivera was just about to go big-time.
Jenni Rivera in 2009 at a concert in Denver, Colorado (Photo by Julio Enriquez/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)įive years ago next week, Mexican regional music superstar Jenni Rivera tragically died in a plane crash following a concert in Monterrey.