LATIN AMERICAN ROCK 'N' ROLL HAS LONG BEEN A MACHO GAME, BUT FEMALE STARS ARE BURNING UP THE CURRENT CHARTS

By TIM PADGETT

hakira Mebarak has become a huge pop phenomenon in Latin America with a combination of fresh-faced, sexy good looks and bouncy synthesized rhythms. The petite 21-year-old Colombian singer-songwriter, known simply as Shakira, blew apart the charts in 1996 with her album Pies Descalzos (Bare Feet), which sold 3.6 million copies worldwide, put her poster on teenage boys' walls across Latin America and even prompted Pope John Paul II to grant her an audience this year.

His Holiness may get a shock if he slaps her next CD on the player. The still untitled work, due for release Sept. 1, leaves no doubt that Miss Wholesome wants to shed her sweet pop persona and move on--as a tough-talking female rocker. One tune puts down boyfriends who stare at other women's behinds; another skewers "thieves," like those inside Colombia's corruption-plagued political system.

The stylings are a long step away from rhythmic acoustical guitar, into the harsher environs of blues and hard rock. The numbers have a "real, organic sound," Shakira says, as she mimes a hollow-body electric-guitar solo at producer Emilio Estefan's Miami recording studio. "The whole core is rock, even the dance songs." Some fans may balk at the result, she adds, but "the most important thing is to be honest."

So honestly, why the risky change in direction? For one thing, because that's where it's at for the growing number of young Latina pop singers who are stepping out of the mainstream to tap a grittier strain inside themselves. Shakira follows on the bootheels of fellow Colombian Andrea Echeverri, a quirky and vocally inventive female rocker, or rockera, whose band, Los Aterciopelados (the Velvets), won a Grammy nomination last year for the album Pipa de la Paz (Peace Pipe). A rebellious Bogota society girl, Echeverri, 32, is hailed by critics as Latin America's best rock singer, male or female, whose multiple body piercings (rings in her nose, chin, eyebrow and navel) tell the world not to mess with her, since she is completely capable of messing with herself--a theme rarely raised before in Latin American women's music. "We don't consciously set out to write antimachismo songs," she insists, "but rather to write songs about valuing women as human beings."

Mexican rockera Julieta Venegas does the same in a more understated fashion. A classically trained pianist from Tijuana, she now bends notes on the accordion as if it were a Fender Stratocaster, in front of her all-male band. "I don't play a lot of major chords," says Venegas, 27, "because my songs are so often about trying to work out differences in human relationships."

If you want a more visceral sound, Brazil's Cassia Eller, 34, has one to offer. Even while living hand-to-mouth 10 years ago, Eller walked away from her first big break--a recording session with Sony Music--when executives insisted that she sing standard pop love songs. She preferred to stick with the hard-edged, socially conscious rock that is her hallmark. Last spring the Rolling Stones picked Eller to open for them in Rio de Janeiro on the Bridges to Babylon tour. "If you do things the way you want to," says Eller, an out-of-the-closet lesbian, "people will eventually respect you."

The time for respect has come. A growing sorority of tough-toned rockeras is pushing its way to the leading edge of traditionally macho Latin American rock. The rockeras are "breaking the shackles of the television-packaged pabulum pop they've always had to adhere to," says John Lannert, Billboard magazine's chief Latin American music writer. CDs like Eller's Veneno Vivo (Live Poison) are selling in the hundreds of thousands; not so long ago tens of thousands for a rockera was a big deal. And it's not just female fans who are responding. "Machismo is dying here," says student Roberto Cruz, 19, dancing at a Venegas concert outside Mexico City. "I'd rather hear interesting songs like these from a Mexican woman than pop garbage."

De Mis Pasos (From My Steps), a song from Venegas' 1996 debut album, Aqui (Here), was the first offering by the new rockeras to break into Mexico's Top 20 singles chart. "I'm learning from my own steps/ I'm understanding my own walk," the song asserts. Venegas' disapproving middle-class father "used to cry every time he saw me doing this," she says. "Now, instead of calling me la necia--the foolish one--he calls me la fuerte--the strong one."

Just as women like Grace Slick and Joan Armatrading did a generation ago, the new rockeras are injecting a female perspective into a testosterone-fueled genre. Part of that perspective is something that could be called subtlety. Venegas, for example, winds through rock songs as enigmatic as the imagery in a Frida Kahlo painting. Aqui has set cerebral new directions for Mexican rock with songs like Como Se (How I Know). "What you don't remember doesn't matter to me anymore," she sings to her lover as a clarinet and drum weave derisively in the background.

The rock ceiling hasn't been easy for these women to crack. Rock-en-espanol itself won mainstream acceptance little more than a decade ago; Mexico actively discouraged the playing of rock on the radio as subversive for much of the 1970s and '80s. After the clouds of censorship lifted, rock was dominated by male acts, such as Argentina's boisterous Fabulosos Cadillacs and Mexico's Cafe Tacuba. When Argentine rock pioneer Charly Garcia brought an all-female group onstage in 1982, the crowd booed them right off. Rockeras who stood their ground in the early days, like Brazil's Rita Lee, were lonely exceptions. The dominance of Latin pop culture by giant broadcast conglomerates also helped to keep the music light and upbeat.

Meantime, today's female stars were working their way quietly up the demanding ladder of the music industry. Venegas gained experience playing keyboard for top Mexican bands like the punkish Tijuana No, while new Argentine star Maria Gabriela Epumer, 34, polished her craft as a guitarist-accompanist. Epumer's solo break came two years ago, when Garcia's band taped an Unplugged session for MTV Latin America. A miniskirted Epumer left viewers entranced. "Suddenly, wherever we went to play, there were fans waiting just to see me," she recalls.

Fortunately, when music executives from Loutec and DBN came calling, Epumer had songs to record. Her album Senorita Corazon (Lady Heart) was released two months ago to loud acclaim. The hit song Voy a Tener Que Buscarte (I'll Have to Look for You) proclaims her angst about finding a lover before the world ends, behind her driving electric guitar; it is heard everywhere in Buenos Aires.

In Shakira's latest transformation, she is showing that she has both a flair for songwriting and performing and a freshly scrubbed sexiness, even when toned with earthy rock 'n' roll. Born in Colombia's tough coastal city of Barranquilla to a Colombian mother and Lebanese father--a jeweler and writer whose Arabic culture was a rich influence on his daughter--Shakira started in the music business at age 10, winning a child entertainers contest as a guitarist. She signed with Sony at age 14. Sony executives considered her a risk, not because of her tender years but because of her precocious fusion of pop-rock, Latin rhythms and intellectualism (singing, for example, of a love turned as cold "as Tiberius in his pine box"). "My entire body is a raw nerve," Shakira says. "I write songs so I don't have to go to a psychiatrist."

Initially, as far as Sony was concerned, a shrink may have been a better idea. Shakira's first two albums were misses, prompting executives to suggest she try her hand at traditional salsa. She lobbied for one more chance. "For a woman who is less than 1.65 m tall--and underage--in front of a meeting of suits and ties, it wasn't easy," she recalls. But she won, and the suits let her record Pies Descalzos. Its phenomenal success led to her signing by powerhouse producer Estefan, whose wife Gloria is the queen of Latin pop.

But it was Shakira who insisted on evolving into a rockera. No one argued--in part because she had already shown the makings of a mature rocker with the final track on Pies Descalzos, Se Quiere ...Se Mata (Wanted...Killed). It's a rock ballad, sung in a voice that evokes the plaintive weariness of Tracey Chapman, about an affluent and pregnant teenager who dies after an abortion. Says Miami Herald music critic Leila Cobo-Hanlon: "Shakira broke the formulaic mold with an authentic sound that hadn't been heard before in Latin American pop."

The same is true of Shakira's forthcoming album. One of the potential hits is a bluesy ballad soaked with wailing electric guitars, and made ethereal by Shakira's Eastern inflections, as a forlorn lover waits for "the insulting strike of the clock to finish planning my end." The question is whether Shakira's fans will accept it. This is, after all, a singer the Colombian government last year designated as an official goodwill ambassador--the cherub whom the Pope received last May at the Vatican, where she asked him to intervene to end her nation's 34-year civil war. She was named Latin Female Artist of the Year at the World Music Awards last May, and her dance songs are so popular in Brazil, where Pies Descalzos has sold 900,000 copies, that she made remixes last year in Portuguese. In short, she runs the risk of letting a lot of people down if she becomes a Latin Courtney Love.

Venegas made an even longer leap in rolling over Beethoven for Chuck Berry. She paid her dues on the U.S.-Mexico border, drenched in the U.S.-Chicano rock sounds of Los Lobos, where her keyboard skills were coveted by local garage bands. She dropped plans to pursue classical music and in 1990 headed for Mexico City--with an accordion. "I wanted to experiment," she says. "The nortena music I grew up with uses accordion, but I'm really following rock artists like Joe Jackson and Tom Waits."

She has turned her accordion riffs into an intriguing Mexican-rock vehicle. In De Mis Pasos, a song about a woman learning to make her own way in the world, the accordion slyly shifts gears through musical dialects of nortena, cajun, hip-hop and pounding rock. In piano ballads like Esta Vez (This Time) and Con Su Propia Voz (With Your Own Voice), which take equal aim at machos and feminists, music and lyrics brim with softer, esoteric phrases. "This time we're made of paper/ The infractions and pages of the Bible," she sings on Esta Vez, as achingly as Rickie Lee Jones. "This time we're being honest."

Ely Guerra, 26, took a tougher road to stardom. She arrived in Mexico City at age 16 as a background vocalist, but her beauty proved an obstacle to being taken seriously as a solo rockera. Producers wanted their rockeras both rugged and ragged. She scored a breakthrough last year with the album Pa' Morirse de Amor (To Die for Love), whose hit, Angel de Fuego (Angel of Fire), with its whispering vocals and growling guitars, is one of the most intelligent rockera songs to date. Like Venegas' work, it explores the human as well as the female condition in Mexico, "how we always invoke one sublime angel or another to free ourselves of unnecessary guilt," she says. Guerra recently shaved her head a la Sinead O'Connor to "help keep the focus on my music." Venegas and Guerra last year kept the focus on women rockers in general by organizing a Latin version of the feminist rock festival Lilith Fair for Mexican rockeras, called De Diva Voz (In the Diva's Voice), which was an unexpected success. It's a project they say they want to continue, but only after they record and release new albums this fall.

Few rockeras are more interesting or talented than Colombia's Andrea Echeverri. She recently received a call on a talk-radio show from a former prep-school classmate, asking her "What had gone wrong with me, imploring me to smarten up," Echeverri chuckles. She and Los Aterciopelados have plenty of fans who think otherwise, especially about last year's Pipa de la Paz album. Composed with bassist Hector Buitrago, the disc has sold 500,000 copies and earned a Grammy nomination for the Best Alternative Latin Rock Album.

Echeverri's idols are not traditional rockers, but Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Not surprisingly, her own standards, like Nada Que Ver (I Want Nothing to Do with You), showcase one of the most creative voices in Latin music. She celebrates and lampoons Latin American vocal traditions, even as she fashions a new and more frank mode of expression. "I detect those macho hunter's genes with my sixth sense," she roars in the muscular Nada Que Ver.

Cassia Eller faces more mainstream challenges than perhaps any other rockera--from Brazil's hypermachismo to its obsession with samba-oriented pop--and she's made a bravura career of taking them all on. Her guttural voice and Jimi Hendrix-influenced guitar, the soul of hits such as O Marginal (The Delinquent), are a fixture of the Latin American rock scene. The daily O Estado de Sao Paulo wrote recently, "She's the savior of a style that men in Brazil have allowed to deteriorate." And she's done it while coming out publicly as a lesbian, still a hazardous thing to do in Brazil. Says Roberto Frejat of the male Brazilian rock band Barao Vermelho (Red Baron): "I think she has incredible virility. Not a homosexual virility, but the way she sings. Cassia is living proof that women rockers have a lot of steam."

Eller, the daughter of an army-paratrooper father and samba-singer mother, "radicalized" Brazilian rock with O Marginal in 1992, says Antonio Carlos Miguel, rock critic for the Rio daily O Globo. A jagged, melodic song, it reflects on the "social mess" on Brazil's streets, telling impoverished delinquents "to do what you have to do to survive," says Eller. "Love your destiny/ as it were/ Commit your crime/ that allows you to see the sun," she sings.

Since then, Eller has had a string of successful albums and singles. This year has been one of her most stellar, not merely on account of the Rolling Stones gig but also as a result of the success of hits like Eu Queria Ser Cassia Eller (I'd Like to Be Cassia Eller), written by a fellow Brazilian, composer Pericles Cavalcante, for this year's Veneno Vivo album. "I could have been a priest/ a poet who writes verse like no one else/ The king of soccer, a great filmmaker, a Nepalese monk/ There is no other hypothesis I wouldn't consider/ But what I would really like to be is Cassia Eller."

That's the kind of applause that Latin America's rockeras have waited years to hear from the Latino boys in the band.

--With Reporting by Greg Aunapu /Miami, Jack Epstein /Rio De Janeiro, Cathleen Farrell /Bogota, Uki Goni /Buenos Aires and Rachel Salaman /Mexico City