The music video for Selena Gomez & the Scene’s 2011 hit “Love You Like a Love Song” starts with Gomez performing the song in a karaoke club. She begins as “normal” Selena, just a regular teenage girl who just happens to be rich and famous. But as she gets further into the song, Gomez transforms. First she’s a ’70s disco babe. Then she’s Marie Antoinette. Then she’s a vampire. (We think.)
As music videos go, it’s a good one—the Selenators voted it Selena Gomez’s greatest career moment—but Selena’s shifting identities are illuminating in a different sense: For a teen star who’s been incredibly successful in music, TV and film, we have remarkably little idea who Selena Gomez is as an artist.
Think of Selena’s contemporaries. Demi Lovato has the best voice in the game, and an inspiring comeback story. Taylor Swift has the love life, and the hits it inspires. Miley Cyrus has the struggle to escape Hannah Montana. Justin Bieber is the boy emperor. One Direction is remaking A Hard Day’s Night for the Internet generation.
What’s Selena Gomez’s “thing”? It’s hard to say. She’s got elements of those familiar storylines to her, but they never quite add up. She has a child-star past, but seems less conflicted about it than Miley and Demi. She has a solid musical career, but hasn’t had a massive culture-wide hit the way Taylor or Bieber have. “Come & Get It” might end up being that—it’s lurking right outside the top 5—but while it’s a great song, it’s not a great Selena Gomez song; it was written by Rihanna’s team, and it shows.
For a while, it looked like “Spring Breakers” could provide a hook: Selena would leave Disney behind and go full bore into a life of Day-Glo hedonism. But then the film came out, and all everybody could talk about was James Franco. Selena isn’t even in the movie for most of the good parts—her character hops a bus home halfway through, and is never seen again. It’s a fine performance, and she gets out with her dignity intact, but we’re left with the nagging notion that she was playing it safe, refusing to follow the film into the deep end.
And so Selena keeps working, a star without an image. (When we write about her, it’s almost always in the context of somebody else.) But there are two signs of hope on the horizon. Selena’s continuing her film career with this summer’s Getaway, in which she plays a carjacker who teams up with Ethan Hawke to rescue his kidnapped wife. From the trailer the film looks to be the kind of enjoyable B-movie the studios don’t make much anymore, the kind that won’t make $300 million or win a boatload of Oscars, but could catapult a young actress to the next level of movie stardom if everything goes right
The second, of course, is Stars Dance, Selena’s first album without the Scene, arriving next month. Could it be for Gomez what Unbroken was for Demi Lovato, a chance to re-brand herself as an adult artist with her own unique vision? We’ll find out in July, but in the mean time, we want to hear from you, Selenators. What do you like most about Selena Gomez?
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