VIVA THE DIVAS!

By RICHARD CORLISS

It seems every country-music juke box has just one song on it these days: Shania Twain's Any Man of Mine. This chirpy feminist anthem, so popular that it has inspired a parody version by a male singer, is generic pop at its most infectious. It has a little festival of familiar tropes: fiddles and steel guitars, drawling humor and tight harmonies, a pounding melody echoing Neil Young's Love Is a Rose and some "yeahs" filched from Ray Charles. There's even a snatch of rap, square-dance style, as it might be rendered by a cheerleader at Buford Pusser High.

But what catches the ear of any diva devotee is Twain's easy virtuosity. Attend to her reading of this verse: "Any man of mine'll say it fits just right/ When last year's dress is just a little too tight/ And anything I do or say, that'll be O.K./ When I have a bad hair day." The throaty intimacy, the smart selling of each phrase, the whisper of lightly ironic girl talk in "just a little too tight," the clear but not prissy enunciation--these are signs of a true storyteller in song. And since she delivers the whole verse in a single confident breath, Twain gets a free pass into the pantheon of thrushes.

It's a weird place to be because in pop, women are always an endangered species. From Elvis to Eddie Vedder, modern pop has been a guy's game; the primal image is of a man and his guitar, the tortured satyr and his magic lute. And the women? They can scream in the audience or maybe sing backup. In childhood girls are no more encouraged to pick up a Les Paul Black Beauty than pilot an F-16. They are expected to play only one instrument: the voice.

But as the form and its listeners mature, pop music is offering a nice niche for female singers, in solo CDs and compilation albums. The sound track for Boys on the Side, an all-female set featuring songs by Annie Lennox, Melissa Etheridge, Bonnie Raitt and Sheryl Crow, hit the Billboard Top 10. Some of these singers are also represented on Women for Women, with part of the sales money destined for breast-cancer research. In September, Rounder Records will release Global Divas, a three-CD set of the premier thrushes in world music; some proceeds will go to the United Nations Development Fund for Women. The Portuguese sextet Madredeus, featuring ethereal vocals by Teresa Salgueiro, gets a handsome showcase in Wim Wenders' new film, Lisbon Story.

Many female performers, like Twain, compose their own music. Many don't, and are thus handicapped by pop's 30-year tyranny of singer-songwriters. Since the Beatles and Bob Dylan, this is the rule: if you don't write, you're no artist. "Vocal interpreter" used to be an honorable job description--good enough for Crosby, Sinatra, Ella, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, who wrote little of their own material. Now the epithet is often a slur. It suggests a lounge singer crooning Can You Feel the Love Tonight.

So here's another nice retro movement: women who are pleased to sing other people's songs. And still another: some people are getting it. Alison Krauss--the child fiddle prodigy who grew up to be a world-class bluegrass singer with her band Union Station--has found that her sampler CD, Now That I've Found You, has suddenly made her a star. The set, with three new cuts and tastes from nine (count 'em!) previous albums, puts Krauss' mountain-stream soprano on pretty display. She attacks, or rather caresses, standards from old R. and B. (the title tune), gospel (the soul-lifting When God Dips His Pen of Love in My Heart) and the Lennon-McCartney catalog (an elfin I Will). For record sellers and buyers, the album was a revelation--imagine, a singer with no gimmick but talent and a great, rangy taste in music.

The freshet of cover albums includes some by singer-songwriters taking a break from composing. In last year's Cover Girl, nouvelle folkie Shawn Colvin (whose naked plaint I Don't Know Why has been recorded by Krauss) relaxes her high-I.Q. edginess and stretches her voice to embrace some fine funky tunes. And Lennox follows her I-can-do-it-all-by-myself 1992 album (aptly titled Diva) with Medusa, 10 old and new songs written by others. Most of the tunes fit Lennox's husky voice and her gift for weaving a dramatic spell that is almost visual.

In Divadom, an album needs only one great song. Medusa has two. The first song, No More "I Love You's," relies on Lennox's evocation of love's demons--"Desire, despair, desire, so many monsters"--and her conjuring up, in a monologue during the instrumental bridge, of a little girl for whom those monsters come to life; a woman's bed of sad passion has telescoped into a child's bedroom fears at midnight. The final number is Paul Simon's 1973 Something So Right. In Lennox's simple, stately reworking, she shifts the location of a verse, bending a vowel here, a feeling there. At the end she answers the pessimism of No More "I Love You's" and completes the album's circle: "Some people never say the words 'I love you,'/ But like a child I'm longing to be told." Again a girl in a woman's supple voice, Lennox finds salvation foraging in a child's garden of pleas from the heart.

If you want heart expressed in poetry of one syllable, you just naturally go to country singers. The plaintiveness is in that catch in the throat, the one that gulps back pain to twist an irony around a truism. In their latest albums, two of the finest country stylists, Patty Loveless (When Fallen Angels Fly) and Trisha Yearwood (Thinkin' About You), have acquired a tinge of art--and art songs. Both have recorded numbers by Gretchen Peters, whose tunes have a panoramic poignancy. Yearwood does right fine by On a Bus to St. Cloud, about a woman who sees her old love in every new city. Loveless, whose very name suggests a solitude that soldiers on, has two Peters gems on her stalwart set. She gets the reciprocal ache in You Don't Even Know Who I Am, a double farewell note from a couple married too long and together not at all; and she finds all the pulse and promise in Ships, a fairy tale about two Las Vegas losers who strike it rich in love.

Behind every happy ending in country songs lies an answer song about how horrible heaven must be. Back in the pop world, though, not all love songs are about love left for dead; many are about born-again amour. On Bette Midler's new album, Bette of Roses, the songs are mostly upbeat--and the usually caustic Miss M. appears to be serious, dammit, when she sings, "The only dream that mattered had come true/ In this life I was loved by you." Optimism being ever suspect in the arts, Midler has been dished much scorn for the album. Well, pooh to those for whom a bad attitude is a singer's only prerequisite. The songs here may not be instant standards, but they allow Midler to show that in her 50th year her voice is in great shape, able to climb whole registers without sweating, and find both heart and ache in the lexicon of pop ballads.

Midler has never left the concert stage. But Cyndi Lauper was in desperate need of a comeback. A decade ago, she was a sort of hip novelty act. With her cartoony, little-girl-lost voice, she sounded like Betty Boop after a month at Betty Ford's. This vocal persona was so successful that she could baby-talk her way sulkily through an entire ballad, the smash True Colors (or, as she pronounced it, Twu Cuhwuhs). Lauper had golden pipes, but she mostly kept them hidden; perhaps they embarrassed her.

Now, in her Twelve Deadly Cyns album, they're out of the closet. This greatest-hits compilation has three previously unreleased cuts, one of them a cover of Gene Pitney's 1963 I'm Gonna Be Strong. A renunciation lament written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil in the one-huge-crescendo mode fashioned by Roy Orbison, it gives Lauper the chance to create scary musical melodrama within three minutes. She starts in a whisper, escalates to a taunting rasp and ends--a declaration of solitude later and a couple of octaves higher--in emotional exhaustion. At the climax Lauper daringly slips in a phrase of her old baby talk ("How I'w bweak down and ...") before the grown-up sonic blast of the final "cry," a keening that might have come from Oedipus.

I'm Gonna Be Strong is a gut-twisting turn for both listener and singer. It proves again that, in somebody's trunk, there are terrific songs just waiting for sensational performances. Lauper's example here is instructive for female singers of the pop persuasion. Don't send in the clown. Call out the diva.