And then there's the strange case of Enough Cryin', a thug-unlove duet credited to Blige and a female rapper named Brook. Blige sings, "It's time I do something for me." The rapper evidently -- and rather clumsily -- agrees, and for good reason: Brook is Blige's hip-hop alter ego. Sometimes misery doesn't need any company.
By contrast, there's no real drama in Hips Don't Lie, which is part of what makes it such a good summer song: You get the breezy feeling that absolutely nothing's at stake. Maybe that's just as well, because it turns out Shakira isn't the first woman to share this song with Jean. Hips Don't Lie began its life as Dance Like Me, a duet with Claudette Ortiz from the soundtrack to the movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.
Talk about a complicated courtship: The song was remade and then included as a bonus track on this spring's rerelease of Shakira's Oral Fixation Vol. 2, which was originally released last year as an English-language sequel to the Spanish-language Fijacion Oral Vol. 1.
Jean updated his monumentally inept rhymes ("Why the CIA wanna watch us?/Colombians and Haitians/I ain't guilty, it's a musical transaction"), which sound much better when surrounded by Shakira's yodeling; she sounds monumentally ept, or something. "I'm on tonight/ You know my hips don't lie/And I am starting to feel you, boy," she sings, although the boy in question could hardly be more superfluous. "No fighting," he declares, apropos of nothing in particular; in keeping with thug-love etiquette, she murmurs, "No fighting," in response.
Best of all, the song -- which has already topped radio airplay charts -- has arrived at exactly the right time. As US politicians debate Mexican immigration, Shakira and Jean have concocted a garish, unstoppable Latin hybrid. Jean raps in Spanglish; the video emphasizes the song's ersatz Cuban roots; the beat comes straight from the Puerto Rico-based reggaeton genre.
Summer flings often don't quite make sense in retrospect, but who cares? For right now, at least, this is the sound of summer 2006.
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