The Sexiest Woman in Music Today: Shakira

She clears her throat daintily, then speaks: “I feel like a horse that hasn’t been castrated.”

As opening gambits go, it’s an unexpected one, but then Shakira, the part-Colombian, part-Lebanese singer who has conquered the world, is an altogether unexpected rock star.

Given that she became fluent in English only two years ago, and that she likes to employ florid metaphors whenever possible, maybe something has been lost in translation. This, after all, is the woman who once sang that her breasts were small and humble and thus wouldn’t be confused with mountains, and the woman who, later today, will say she feels like a tree whose branches have crossed many territories. “I should be bearing fruit from my fingers,” she will suggest, straight-faced and solemn. But no, she’s quite adamant on this one: She really does feel like a big-testicled stud.

“The word in Spanish is brio,” she says. “What is the English for brio?” The word in English is the same, brio, and it means vivacity, but she is looking for a very particular noun right now. She turns to her parents, her brother Antonio and anybody else in the room who has a knowledge of Spanish, but nobody can provide her with it.

“Ah, forget it, all of you,” she says. “Anyway, it’s the word for a male horse who hasn’t been castrated. That is me — full of strength and very, very productive. I feel that this is the time in my life when I should go out into the world and achieve. I have so much enthusiasm and determination, and I should make the most of these feelings. Who knows? Maybe when I get older I won’t have that enthusiasm anymore, so this is why I am making the most of my time right now.”

She’s certainly capitalizing on it: Laundry Service, her first English-language album, was released at the beginning of 2002 and has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide — but she won’t finish promoting it until halfway through 2003. “I have so much to . . . to impart,” she says. Her chocolate-drop eyes are huge, her bright smile effusive. “You understand my meanings, yes?”

Her doting father, forever at her periphery, approaches, bearing gifts on a small plate. “Have a cashew nut,” he says.


Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll is 25 years old and 4 feet, 11 inches tall. She used to be brunette but recently found blond in a bottle, liked it and now looks astonishingly movie-star sexy. Offstage, however, she dresses down with remarkable aplomb. When Blender meets her for the first time at the airport in freezing Montreal — she is halfway through the North American leg of her Tour of the Mongoose — she is dressed in a shapeless black top several sizes too large and a pair of dirty, oil-stained jeans that look as if they’re on loan from Tommy Lee. Her kiss-curls, meanwhile, are hidden beneath a big black hat, from which her brown eyes peer nervously like a rabbit’s. As she walks through the departure lounge, only her entourage, her 19 pieces of luggage, an Air Canada official and a great, hulking bodyguard alert the passersby of her VIP credentials.

“I am a shy person,” she explains, folding her legs into a Buddha-like pose in the first-class lounge, awaiting a flight to Toronto, “and I don’t like to always be drawing attention to myself.”

But when she steps onstage, something extraordinary happens. Barefoot but defiantly erect enough to break the magical five-feet barrier, she stands clad in a tiny T-shirt and a pair of leather hip-huggers that accentuate a hall-of-fame booty — think Mick Jagger’s vintage rock & roll backside crossed, against all odds, with J.Lo’s hip-hop tush. Shakira can shimmy and shake with the pliability of elastic, and when she belly dances during “Objection (Tango)” and, especially, the closing “Whenever, Wherever,” which she does while balancing a lighted candelabra on her head, 12,000 Canadians descend into all-out frenzy. It’s a remarkable sight. It is here, in concert, where Shakira reveals her many dimensions.

When she first came to the attention of an English-speaking audience, Colombia’s second-biggest export was erroneously marketed as a Latin Britney Spears, a former teen star who could pirouette in a pair of hot pants while singing cheeky pop songs.

But when was the last time Spears — or, for that matter, any of the current crop of divas: Christina, J.Lo, Madonna, even — lectured about politics in the middle of a concert? Or played electric guitar, or thrashed out a rhythm on the drums? Or reinterpreted AC/DC’s “Back in Black” as an anthem of unadulterated sleaze? Like her rock hero, Bono, Shakira has messages of peace, love and understanding she wishes to impart. Her songs are love songs, full of carnival celebration; the activist stuff — one slogan flashed up between numbers reads BITE THE NECK OF HATRED — can be taken or left as desired. She’s not Rage Against the Machine, not just yet.

And then there is her voice. In addition to lending itself, Celine Dion–style, to imposing ballads, it can also belt out a rock chorus in the manner of a female Axl Rose. Shakira, the belly dancer from heaven, might just be all things to all people. Toy manufacturer Mattel has announced plans to produce a Shakira doll; it will need to have a great many features to do the woman justice.

“There is a bridge between me and my new audience at the moment,” she explains, “and I want to cross it. I want to show them who the real Shakira is. I want to inspire thoughts and ideas. Pop music is the most effective vehicle to reach the masses, and I have always seen myself in this kind of role — a messenger. This is why I touch on politics during the show.”

The general view, she says, seems to be that pop stars should leave their political statements in their hotel rooms. But this is a view, like so many others, with which she disagrees. “I am a pop star, but I also have an opinion. I grew up in a country that has existed under the whip of violence for 40 years, so how can I not? You know, in my country, a 5-year-old kid knows not only of Disney and Mickey Mouse, but also of guerrillas and paramilitaries. You grow up with that kind of awareness, of what the world is really like.”

She falls silent for a while but keeps one hand aloft to indicate that she has not finished talking just yet. Thirty-seven seconds tick slowly by. “To be political in my country doesn’t mean that you want to run for the presidency. To be political simply means to have an opinion.”

Recently, she has been thinking a lot about wars and leaders and the terrifying state the world is currently in. This is why her show includes video footage depicting George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein playing a deadly game of chess: an allegory in which, she informs us, the people of the world are the pawns.

“Every day on the news there are more killings. I worry about this. In the first world war, 9 million people were killed; the second world war, more than 40 million. I don’t want to think about how many would die in the next one.

“It may sound old-fashioned, but I desperately want for world peace. So yes, I do want to see Iraq disarmed, but also China disarmed, Korea disarmed, America disarmed. We should strive toward the day when every country is disarmed. We need a resolution: All weapons of mass destruction should be destroyed, as well as biological warfare. The only guarantee we have to see that the world survives another millennium is to do this. Otherwise, we are all going straight to the — how do you say? — to the abyss.” She shakes her head.

The title of her tour, she explains, refers to good versus evil. “The cobra is deadly, but the mongoose can overcome it. We all have the possibility to defeat prejudice and resentment in our lives. Fear is the thing that makes us attack, that makes us strike, but we must overcome it. We must.”


Shakira was born in Barranquilla, a small port town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. She was the only child from her father’s second marriage; in his first, he produced six sons and three daughters. She first sang publicly at age 4, wrote her first song at 8 and wooed a Sony record executive in a hotel lobby when she was 13. The next year, she released her first album, Magia, but like its successor, Peligro, it sank without a trace. By the time she was 15, she and her mother had moved to Bogotá, where she landed a role in the soap opera El Oasis. “I was a terrible actress,” she says, laughing. Her third album, Pies Descalzos, finally gave her a hit, but it was her fourth, 1998’s Dónde Estàn Los Ladrones?, that made her a star, selling more than 4 million copies across Central and South America.

By now, her hunger for world domination was growing, so she taught herself English by reading the dictionary and the poetry of Walt Whitman. She fired her then-manager, Emilio Estefan Jr. (Gloria Estefan’s husband), and approached Freddie DeMann, who once managed Michael Jackson and Madonna. Then she wrote and self-produced Laundry Service.

“I think I would be lying if I told you that I’m surprised by its success,” she says coyly. “I worked with God on this, and I never would have taken the risk of making an English-language album if I didn’t have a feeling, an intuition, that things would work out well for me.

“I often look at who I am, and where I come from. I grew up in a small town speaking Spanish with a bag full of dreams, and then one day I traveled to the capital and started fighting for those dreams. And now here I am living out my wildest illusions, and I have reached more people than I ever thought possible.” She breaks off and looks melodramatically into the distance. Shakira can deliver dramatic monologues with the best of them. Somewhere, the producer for the soap in which she once starred is ruing the day he let her quit.

“Life has been very benevolent to me,” she says. “People know and love me all over the world, and that makes me feel like a citizen of the entire planet. But ultimately, I dedicate my work to my country, Colombia. Number one, because I was born and raised there” — she now lives in Miami with her boyfriend, Antonio de la Rua, son of the former president of Argentina — “and number two, because they need reasons to smile and reasons to celebrate. They need good news. I feel such responsibility to my people; I think I am a motivation to them all. You know, sometimes I feel that I don’t just carry my family on my shoulders, but also many thousands of people and all their hopes and dreams.” She sighs and swoons. “I take this job very seriously indeed.”

And yet, she confesses, “this job” is nothing but a game.

“It is a game, isn’t it? We are like children, pop stars. We pose in front of the camera, we make videos, we get our hair and makeup done. It is like a little kid’s game, so full of glitter. Sometimes I feel like a Barbie doll: so many interviews, endless photo sessions. But never mind; I am well trained. Just like a soldier does his duty, so I do mine.”

In addition to her roles as Colombia’s spiritual mentor and world polemicist, Shakira is also a siren, a red-hot sex symbol — the sexiest in the business, no less. You’d think that perhaps she would find such frivolity offensive given her concern about Earth’s plight, but her sly smile suggests otherwise.

“If a 25-year-old woman tells you she isn’t flattered to be chosen as the sexiest woman in music and put on the cover of a magazine like Blender, then I’m sorry, but she is lying,” she says. “Of course it’s flattering. I cannot deny that. And it is something to tell my children. Especially when I am old and covered in cellulite, which will happen one day.”

Despite her close approximation of physical perfection, Shakira has long suffered from a negative body image. She spent years peering at herself in the mirror, picking herself apart, wishing that her pert breasts were more pendulous.

“Some days I would look at my reflection and see garbage,” she says sourly, “and I guess I was worried about the size of my breasts for a long time. But now I think I have finally reached an age where I have accepted myself for who I am. And anyway, a big butt is far more important in Latin culture.”

Would she ever consider plastic surgery?

“I would never say I wouldn’t drink from this water,” she says, poetically, “because maybe one day I would. If after I had children my breasts didn’t look good, then perhaps I would have something done to them. But also I think it could be a dangerous game — addictive, maybe. Who knows?”

In a roundabout way, we discuss Christina Aguilera’s recent conversion to photogenic sex goddess.

“I think each person has the right to express themselves the way they wish,” Shakira says diplomatically. “That’s what I like about this country: the right to freedom. But for me, there is a fine line between being sensual and sexual. From the N to the X there are, like, 10 or 11 letters, a pretty long distance, and I want to stay on this side, close to the N.

“Also, I don’t want the emphasis to be on sexy, because being a singer is so much more than that. I want to provoke thoughts, not simply lust. I don’t want to sound cheesy, but I do feel it is important to relay such messages to the world.”


IT IS NOW 11 o’clock at night, backstage at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre. As the final chords of “Whenever, Wherever” still ring out across a cheering crowd, Shakira has already fled the stage and been spirited into a waiting car. She is tired and she needs sleep. Her parents, who are always by her side, cosset her protectively. En route back to the hotel, she turns to Blender.

“I have been thinking about our conversation,” she says, “and there is more I want to add, more I want to tell you. May we speak in the morning?”

But then morning comes, and with it a belated realization: Today is a day off. Shakira’s mother wants a new fur coat, and the entire Mebarak clan is famously good at shopping. Plus, Shakira really wants to go to the movies. Any further philosophical musings with Blender have to be put on indefinite hold. Harry Potter is beckoning, and the blond pop goddess loves Harry Potter.

“I like the girl in it,” she says, beaming. “She is so capable, so strong, and a control freak.” The beam becomes incandescent. “Just like me.”