R&B’s female frontrunners Beyoncé, Ashanti, Monica, Mya, and Lumidee BY CARLY CARIOLI

Beyoncé Knowles, the bootylicious goddess of black pop, has a complexion the color of Grammys and Oscars and a smile that any self-respecting soft-drink company in America would kill for. Her cocoa-butter voice takes to curves with the same exhilaration that the camera takes to her hips, and as the summer of 2003 broke, her coronation as pop music’s leading lady seemed pre-ordained. Already an established box-office star thanks to Austin Powers in Goldmember, she’d consummated lucrative endorsement deals with both Pepsi-Cola and Jay-Z by the time her solo debut, Dangerously in Love (Columbia), hit the streets on June 24. In her Pepsi commercial, Beyoncé’s strut paralyzes a star-struck gas-station attendant into drooling, drop-jawed awe. In the video for "Crazy in Love," Dangerously’s first single, we are bidden to follow in the way of the attendant, as Beyoncé and a gaggle of her scantily clad friends sweat through their shorts over an unrelenting brassy hook; the clip culminates with a circle of women shaking their behinds and cooing "Uh-oh" while Jay-Z blows up a car. Neither Austin Powers nor Charlie’s Angels ever had it so good.

But just a week after Dangerously in Love had debuted at #1, Beyoncé was unceremoniously bounced from the top slot by Ashanti, whose "Rock wit U (Aww Baby)" had been tearing up the airwaves for the better part of a month. Even before her Chapter II (Murder Inc./Def Jam/Universal) unseated Dangerously, Ashanti Douglas had enjoyed a meteoric rise by playing Beauty to a succession of hip-hop Beasts including Fat Joe ("What’s Luv?"), Ja Rule ("Always on Time," "Mesmerize"), and, posthumously, Big Pun and Notorious B.I.G. The debut of Chapter II at #1, edging out Dangerously in Love by a mere 10,000 units, set up a race to rival the track scenes in Seabiscuit — and one that likewise purported to pit an aristocrat against a champion of the people. It hardly matters that both Ashanti and Beyoncé are the products of middle-class upbringings. Whereas Beyoncé is gunning to become a crossover sensation in the tradition of Diana Ross, Murder Inc. honcho Irv Gotti is hoping that Chapter II will become Ashanti’s "ghetto pass" — a disc that will give her lifelong credibility with black audiences. In the second week that the discs went head to head, Ashanti won again in a photo finish: the two were separated by fewer than 4000 copies. Gotti had done the unthinkable: in his quest to out-ghetto Beyoncé, he had also won over a larger share of the mainstream pop audience.

Since then, Dangerously has inched past Chapter II and "Crazy in Love" has lodged itself at the top of the singles charts, but there ought to be a lesson in Chapter II’s success for Beyoncé, who remains luminescent despite being cast consistently against type. Not a few onlookers have wondered why black pop’s reigning superstar has been reduced to supporting roles on her own album — both of her current singles are duets (with Jay-Z and dancehall star Sean Paul), and that gives credence to the cynical view that R&B is becoming, at best, a subsidiary of the hip-hop industry.

Only a few years ago, with Destiny’s Child’s "Bills Bills Bills" and "Survivor," Beyoncé was heir apparent to Janet Jackson as an icon of womanly self-reliance and self-determination. Now she does the best she can with the meager roles afforded to her. Once an Independent Woman, she plays a convincing sex kitten on the aforementioned "Naughty Girl," backed by bracing, Neptunes-styled funk and a tricky dash up a Middle Eastern scale; she does a less-convincing turn as a ghetto stepmom in "Me, Myself, and I"; and on "That’s How You Like It," she and Jay-Z essay the Ashanti/Ja Rule thug-love genre. She may pick up a few heshers with "Hip Hop Star," cooing "I dare you to undress me" over a Rage Against the Machine–like bass line and a frisky Afro-Cubist car-chase drum pattern. But from a singer who should have had access to the best and brightest producers in pop, the rest of the album is surprisingly tepid. Her duet with Luther Vandross proves that the clichés of quiet-storm slow jams haven’t changed since Ashford & Simpson ruled the roost, and even her collaboration with Missy Elliott, a musical tour of the zodiac titled "Signs," seems strategically restrained — a by-product of trying to please too many constituencies at once.

Ashanti’s Ja Rule hook-ups may have driven Beyoncé into a flurry of hip-hop collaborations, but the Murder Inc. crew, perhaps sensing a severe case of overexposure, keep Ja under wraps for all of Chapter II. Whereas the rest of R&B’s divas farm out their songwriting and production to hitmaking teams, Ashanti’s material was written and produced by Murder Inc.’s in-house squad. And Gotti has fallen back in love with live instruments to fill out his productions, building up even the most sample-driven cuts into full-bodied mini-symphonies emboldened with strings, guitars, and trunk-shaking g-funk soul.

This, of course, points directly to the house of hip-hop soul that Mary J. Blige built. Ashanti, with her warm, apple-cheeked radiance, lacks Mary’s fiery, church-schooled vehemence, but she brings a pop-friendly cosmopolitan elegance that works almost as well. On "Then Ya Gone," with Inc. henchman Chink Santana pitching in a Snoop-like verse, she summons up a minor-key world-weariness ("One day you’re here, and then you’re gone") that neatly fits the anxieties of self-styled thugs, hip-hop stars, and R&B divas alike. Whatever her songs lack in depth she seems to make up for with style: "Rock wit U" could’ve been run-of-the-mill, but there is something irresistible about her "aww baby" ad-lib — a tic so infectious that Gotti made her sing it in almost every line. Those dynamics — a singer’s immediacy breaking through the skin of a song that’s all surface, and a producer’s being savvy enough to place that drama center stage — are in evidence everywhere on Chapter II, an album that raises Ashanti into the recent pantheon of Janet and the late Aaliyah.

If Missy Elliott’s "Signs" failed to lift Beyoncé out of her doldrums, it might’ve been because Missy’s best material ended up on Monica’s After the Storm (J Records), the album that Dangerously unseated from the #1 slot. Five years after Monica won her teen-R&B faceoff against Brandy on "The Boy Is Mine," After the Storm was rumored to have been locked in committee until Missy rescued it with four new songs. It was already shaping up as a bleak album before Missy came along: the Soulshok-produced "I Wrote This Song" turns a Shuggie Otis track into a suicide ballad; "Don’t Gotta Go Home" stars Monica as a woman enabling DMX’s screaming infidelities; and Rodney Jerkins brings the same dark-side, sci-fi funk he pioneered with TLC to "Ain’t Gonna Cry No More." Monica’s singing, like Roberta Flack’s, is sensual and urbane with a brusque, jazzy palette, and Missy’s songs frame her with sunsets and shadows borrowed from vintage soul — the æthereal lead single, "So Gone," takes a lick from the Whispers, and her pensive "Knock Knock" gets its Memphis-in-the-’70s drawl from a sample of the obscure Isaac Hayes–masterminded group the Masqueraders.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is Mya, who appears ready to out-booty the bootylicious one herself. The Independent Woman now has to contend with a "Sophisticated Lady" — to name one of the tracks on Mya’s new Moodring (A&M) — who’s willing to reposition herself as a freak on a leash. The most demure, and least likely, of the "Lady Marmalade" quartet (with Pink, Christina, and Lil’ Kim), Mya had been safe enough to land a song on the Rugrats soundtrack, and her dancing skills were good enough for the film version of Chicago. But her shyness had obviously worn off by the time she planted the year’s most awkward lap dance on TRL host Carson Daly last month while lip-synching her current hit. (Penned by Missy, it includes the line, "My ass is like . . . whoa!"; is this a step up from Missy’s own "Work It," on which she declared that her "ass goes whoom"?)

The spectacle of a good little girl going bad for what appear to be professional reasons will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Christina Aguilera recently, and Mya does X-tina one better on "Taste This," where she taunts a partner, "How would you feel if when we’re making love I don’t go down no more?" At least Mya got another film role out of it: she’ll appear later this year in — what else? — the long-awaited sequel to Dirty Dancing. And she treats Moodring less like a diary than like a film script — playing the temptress role mostly for fun, from the old-school party funk of "Sophisticated Lady" (in essence a cover of Rick James’s "Cold Blooded") to a dreamy "Free Fallin’ " (yes, a cover of the Tom Petty song) to a gloriously swishy, Electroclash-inspired "Whatever Bitch," which is destined to land next to Peaches on booty-tek mixtapes from Detroit to Paris.

For all that, one of the summer’s biggest female-sung R&B songs, "Never Leave You (Uh-Oh)," came from an unknown singer from Spanish Harlem named Lumidee, who cobbled together a hit the old-fashioned way: she spotted a trend, hitched her ride to a hot beat, and got the track to market quicker than anyone else. The song’s cockeyed, lopsided, hand-clapped rhythm — dubbed "diwali" by its inventor, a producer and keyboardist for Buju Banton named Steven "Lenky" Marsden — had recently appeared on hits by Sean Paul and his fellow dancehall star Wayne Wonder. As with Ashanti’s "Rock wit U," an ad-lib became the central lyric hook: "Never Leave You" sounds less like a song than like a fantastic accident, one long chorus and an unstoppable beat. It quickly spawned an official remix by Busta Rhymes and an unofficial remix featuring 50 Cent; when Ol’ Dirty Bastard got out of jail, it was "Never Leave You" that he rapped over to get his groove back.

Lumidee isn’t a great singer, even in her own estimation. "I got the whole world singing off-key!" she exclaims on her Almost Famous (Universal), which was recorded, manufactured, and released within six weeks of the song’s taking off. Even with that quick turn-around, "Never Leave You" was a radio hit for weeks before it was commercially available — the sign of pop happening at the speed of the streets. It’s certainly no coincidence that Beyoncé’s latest single, "Baby Boy," is a duet with Sean Paul based on a diwali-derived handclap. Beyoncé began the summer at the head of the pack, and yet when you hear "Baby Boy" on the radio, it sounds as if she’d spent all summer catching up.