No boardroom plan for crossover success could have devised a figure like Shakira. Her mother is Colombian, her father Lebanese; in Arabic, Shakira means "woman full of grace." She speaks Spanish, Portuguese and English, and wants to learn more languages. She calls herself a nomad; she has houses in the Bahamas, where she now lives, and in Miami, while she still regularly visits her hometown, Barranquilla, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Her Middle Eastern side comes out in vocal arabesques and belly-dance moves, but she's also steeped in rock, pop and disco; the first album she owned, on a cassette, was Donna Summer's Bad Girls.
Shakira has been in charge of her own music for a decade. She began writing songs at eight and was signed to a recording contract at 13. In Bogota, she made two albums of Latin pop that, she said, "don't represent me at all." She had a brief stint acting in a Colombian soap opera; she doesn't think she was very good at it. Then, with Pies Descalzos ("Bare Feet"), released in 1996, Shakira started producing herself with collaborators she chose.
She added: "I don't want to sound like a feminist saying this. But it's true, it's a man's world."
Shakira was already a star across Latin America by the end of the 1990s. So she set out to learn English well enough to write lyrics, and she conquered the rest of the world with Laundry Service, which sold 3 million copies in the US and an estimated 10 million more worldwide.
Fijacion Oral, Vol. 1 reconnected Shakira with her longtime Spanish-speaking fans. Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 includes English versions (though not direct translations) of two songs from Vol. 1; the other nine are new. Perhaps because the songs are in English rather than Spanish, the music moves closer to Anglo rock and pop, dipping into folk-rock, power ballads and the Cure. "Sometimes a melody suggests in what language that song should be written," she said. "I just learned to listen to what the song wants to tell me."
Rehearsal beckoned. In a few days, Shakira would be singing the songs in public for the first time. "Just today," she said, "I'm starting to get in touch with the songs from the performer point of view. OK, how am I going to interpret this with my body? How am I going to start to have now a physical relationship with my songs?"
The band kicked into Hey You, a flirtatious song with a 1960s Merseybeat bounce. In it, Shakira offers herself to a man as everything from queen to cook to slave: "I'd like to be the owner of the zipper on your jeans, and that thing that makes you happy." As she sang, she stood still at first, then let the music carry her. Her shoulders start to roll, her feet picked up the rhythm, and soon her hips started to swivel.
"My hips tell me where and when I should move," she had said before returning to work with the band. "And my hips don't lie -- my hips tell me the truth."
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