Shakira, a vibrant creature – profile of the singer from Barranquilla

His English is good, after all, he has what musicians call perfect pitch. He has worked hard on phonics. He adores books, he buys them, smells them and caresses them, but he has very little time to read them (Whitman and Borges are his favorite poets). She is black-haired from birth, and she had a single eyebrow that snaked over her eyes and which she plucked in the center of her eyebrow to give more strength to her expression.

He was born 47 years ago in the home of an American of Lebanese descent and a Colombian of Catalan grandparents. As if he was in a hurry to succeed, he started early. At three years old he already knew how to read and write. At four he belly danced at an evening at his school. Her surprise was general, since no one had trained her. “It was simply a manifestation of genetic memory. Don’t forget that my father has oriental blood,” she explains naturally. At five she suffered her first great disappointment: she was not admitted to the school choir and she cried fifteen days in a row.

At eight he began to write verses and compose songs with his own lyrics and music. The lyrics of the songs and the verses of the poems were childish, of course, but his voice and his music had “duende” – it could be a matter of family “vein”; Let us remember that she is the great-niece of the poet Meira del Mar. At ten she was already entertaining, by contract, the workers of the Cerrejón mines, in Alta Guajira. At thirteen she signed a contract with Sony, a record label that wanted to take advantage of the girl’s voice to retread vallenatos. Fortunately, she had other ideas. She liked Donna Summers, Miguel Bosé, Cat Stevens, Led Zeppelin, Police, Janis Joplin; That is to say, she was already a balladeer with a rock heart, one of the first specimens of that genre in Colombia. The result of this stimulating mix was called Magia, an album that earned her selection to represent the country at the OTI Festival. Unfortunately, the rules of the contest stipulated that the minimum age for participants was sixteen years old, Shakira could not represent us and tears once again obscured her beautiful black eyes.

At seventeen she obtained a title that pisses her off today: she was chosen in the 94th class. “I’m not proud of that title,” she says with poorly contained fury. “Things like that will never happen to me again. I wont allow it”.

To top it all off, she had an affair with a Puerto Rican, actor Oswaldo Ríos. Since the guy was much older, criticism poured in and the whole of Colombia was in suspense because we were all afraid that the Puerto Rican was going to abuse the girl. In reality, Oswaldo’s real defect was being a terrible actor, as well as being stupid, and it is most likely that Shakira abused him, but we must accept that the tail of ’94 and the cutest fool on television did not rhyme very well. .

Two years later, fate gave him splendid revenge: his third album, Pies descalzos, was a musical success in Spain, Latin America and the Hispanic markets of the United States. Four million copies were sold, which earned him twenty-five gold records, 55 platinum records, two years of touring and the cover of the international edition of Time. The album is composed of pop ballads with a touch of reggae. “It is an honest and personal album. It was made with the heart and with the most beautiful of ingenuity. It was like a spiritual striptease,” says the author of it.

In 1999 Shakira burned the album Where Are the Thieves? The songs veer towards rock without betraying the spirit of the ballad or the precepts of pop. The lyrics venture into the social with very good humor. Three long years had passed since the success of Pies Descalzos. It seems that she and her team thought a lot before releasing another album. Success weighs.

In 2000 he recorded Unplugged, a masterpiece that won him the Grammy and brought the world to his feet. The video for the highlight of the CD, “Ojos asi”, a happy Arab-pop fusion, reached 4,500 daily views on television channels around the world, and it is estimated that its radio average exceeded the figure of thirteen thousand broadcasts. daily. Newspapers such as The New York Post, Le Monde; Vaterlan, of the principality of Leichtenstein; El Monitor, from Romania, and Elshaab, from Egypt, dedicated great reports to him. Rolling Stone, Billboard and Vanity Fair magazines did the same. Following the silly gringo commonplace, the magazine titled: “Shakira, the best (legal) export product from Colombia.”

After the breach opened by the Grammy, Shakira, Sony and Emilio Estefan carefully planned their assault on the Anglo-Saxon market. The result was called Laundry Service. Consisting of nine songs in English and four in Spanish, the album sold like bread on all five continents. Europeans, Arabs, Americans, Africans, Australians and Japanese sold out the concerts and album editions. Shakira worked so hard to improve her English that she spoke it even in her sleep.

On the night before the recording of the album, an event for which a private concert had been organized, the stress caused him to feel feverish and he was only able to sleep for an hour. The concert could not be postponed because the next day, musicians, engineers and dancers summoned exclusively for the concert would gather in Miami, coming from all over the world. Shakira arrived twenty minutes late, but she danced, played the guitar and sang and enchanted an audience made up of businessmen and entertainment journalists. As a curious fact, it should be noted that no electronic instruments were used in the recording, only acoustic ones.

Getting to those heights has not been easy, of course. So that we have an idea of ​​her work rhythm, of what “a month in the life of Shakira” can be like, I reproduce here a fragment of the report that Gabriel García Márquez did for Cambio magazine: “Shakira arrived in Buenos Aires in the afternoon of Monday, February 1, 1999, and worked on Tuesday until after midnight, without time to celebrate his twenty-second birthday that day. On Wednesday she returned to Miami, where she did a long photo shoot for publicity and recorded several hours for the English version of her latest album. The next day she continued recording from two in the afternoon until dawn on Friday, she slept three hours and continued recording until three in the afternoon. That night she slept a few hours and early Saturday she flew to Lima.

»(…) On Tuesday the 16th, already in Costa Rica, he gave a live presentation. On Thursday the 18th she traveled to Miami and Caracas, where she participated in the program Sábado Sensacional. She barely slept, because on the 21st she had to fly from Venezuela to Los Angeles to attend the Grammy Awards, hoping to be one of the chosen ones, but the heavyweight from the United States swept away the big awards. She was not intimidated: on the 25th she made the leap to Spain, where she was expected to work on February 27 and 28. On March 1, when she was finally able to sleep a full night in a hotel in Madrid, she had flown as much as a professional stewardess: more than forty thousand kilometers in one month.”

Shakira’s works from that time are marked by eroticism. The title of her album Fixación oral de ella is an ambiguous expression, a play on words that can equally refer to motherhood as it does to lust. The promotional album, recorded with Alejandro Sanz, has some scenes that Shakira herself feared could be “too explicit.” In reality, they are just some shots where Alejandro hugs her from behind her after some voyeur scenes.

The facts

Explaining the Shakira phenomenon is not easy. Factors must be added: her limpid voice, powerful and full of nuances that allow her to sing with “the whole palette”; the melting pot of races and nations that intervene in her mixture: the Caribbean of her land, the Lebanon of her father, the Spain of her mother; the long vibratto of her voice, a personal hallmark of hers; the kinetic intelligence of her body, capable of making us forget that she is short, dazzling us with her luminous stage presence and disturbing us with her disturbing hip bump (another vibratto) and her music, of course, the fortunate fusion of rhythms that make her songs something new and familiar at the same time, and the good management that his managers, chess players in the field, have given to his career. In short, she is, like all brilliant people, the result of the sum of the t factors: talent, work and stubbornness.

The hits

Among his most successful songs are «Hips Don’t Lie, sung with Wyclef Jean at the closing of the World Cup in Germany, 2006. SheWolf, 2009, A single that fuses elements of pop and electronic music. Waka Wakaofficial anthem of the FIFA World Cup, South Africa, 2010. La La La, sung at the closing ceremony of the World Cup in Brazil, 2014. Blackmail, 2016, produced with Maluma. I fell in love, 2017, inspired by her romance with Gerard Piqué. In 2020 she starred alongside Jennifer López in the Super Bowl 54 intermission show. J Balvin, Bad Bunny, Emme Muñiz (daughter of JLo and Marc Anthony) and the Cali salsa group Swing Latino also participated. It was a show with a Latin flavor and explicit criticism of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policy.

Bizzarrap Music Session #53 (2023), better known by the title Guys like you, is Shakira’s sarcastic response to the “goring” that Gerard Piqué gave her with Clara Chía.

Lowdown, revenge and billing

The most difficult moment personally was suffered by Shakira in 2022, when she found out that Gerard Piqué had a romantic relationship with Clara Chía, a 23-year-old young woman and public relations officer for Kosmos, Piqué’s media, sports and entertainment production company.

The news meant the end of Shakira’s marriage and gave rise to a historic revenge, the song “Tipos como tú”, whose video, a tragicomic kitsch production where Piqué literally breaks Shakira’s heart with a bazooka, was a success. in sales. Commentators criticized the production, alleging that the video could have affected the couple’s children: Milan, nine years old, and Sasha, seven years old. For others, it was fair revenge because Piqué had the nerve to take her lover to Shakira’s house, taking advantage of the singer’s absences, and, what they say about her, he mistreated her. In any case, Shakira took advantage of her situation to retread herself because she was going through a drop in sales. Hence the famous phrase in the song “women no longer cry, women make money”. The first is debatable, the second is true. To date, the song has earned Shakira and Bizarrap, an Argentine producer, income of US$700 million.

It is a modern spite song, which includes rapping, low blows, humor, freestyle darts (although without counterpoint because Piqué was not invited) and a bizarre beat adapted to Shakira’s rhythm and her flow, of course.

This trope poses an ethical dilemma: is it legal to publicly insult and ridicule one’s spouse for differences of any kind? The question allows at least two answers. Mom Shakira did not come out well in this round and it will be difficult for her to defend her performance when her children, soon teenagers, question her. But, since almost everything is legal in art because almost nothing is objectionable, the artist Shakira had license to counterattack rudely.

The dilemma, however, is insoluble because the spheres of art and morality are not loose wheels, they constantly intersect. We can separate them for the moment for argumentative convenience, but they remain strongly linked because human beings are fatally political and therefore moral.

Shakira recently told Bocas magazine that she was a wolf who was licking her wounds, picking up and rearranging her bones. I am sure that she will achieve it, that she will write a pop bolero as wonderful as “Hay amores”, better than “Tipos como tú”, perhaps dedicated to herself, to her wonderful heart, wonderful, as in the ballad of Raphael. Her hips and her voice will continue to vibrate for a long time on the stages and in the ears of the millions of fans who applaud her work.