Miss Universe

Early last year, Shakira recalls with glee, she made a shocking decision. She was starting the follow-up to Laundry Service, the 2001 album that made her as big a star here as she is in Spanish-speaking countries. And, she announced to her band, she had a new direction in mind. “I said, ‘Acoustic guitars are forbidden. This is one of the rules. It’s going to be all synthesizers. We are making’”—she bangs a table for emphasis—“‘a new BANG wave BANG record BANG.’”

Now, Laundry Service sold 3.5 million copies in the U.S. because hits like “Wherever, Whenever” and “Underneath Your Clothes” mixed synthesizers with acoustic guitars—plus trashy guitar riffs, big, frisky rock beats and Shakira’s throaty, Middle Eastern roar—in an audacious, mongrelized way that felt both instantly familiar and entirely inventive. So it seemed like madness to change her style so severely. A new wave record? Que?

But willpower constitutes most of the singer’s 4-foot-11 stature, and when she makes a rule, people obey: synthesizers only, then, and God help anyone who ventures near her with an acoustic instrument. For the next few months, the band worked only on electronic keyboards. All was peaceful, briefly. And then, one day, she turned to address her band again.

“I said, ‘I’m sick of synthesizers. I don’t wanna see one more synthesizer. Bring all the acoustic guitars you can.’” And in an instant, synthesizers were banished as though she was allergic to them.

This scenario explains not only the dialectic process of combining opposites that led to her new Spanish-language album, Fijación Oral 1, in which new wave keyboards frolic with acoustic guitars in a Latin American club, but also what it’s like to be in Shakira’s sphere: She’s a tornado, you’re a tree. You either bend to her force or get uprooted and thrown into some trailer homes.

In a tour documentary released last year on her Live & Off the Record DVD, Shakira argues with manager Freddy DeMann about playing a concert in Argentina. DeMann, who managed Madonna—the original human tornado—won’t agree to the money-losing trip. She glares, pouts, insists, threatens. He puts his hands to his head in frustration. “Read my lips,” he tells her. “We’re not going to Argentina.” Then, as in a sitcom where the husband can’t defy the wife, the film jumps to a Shakira concert in Argentina. DeMann, by the way, no longer manages Shakira.

She is not only willful but also smart: fluent in Spanish, English and Portuguese, she can also speak decent Italian and some Arabic (“Just the curse words”). She makes occasional mistakes in English (“humoristic” instead of “humorous”) but also speaks with a poetic flair for analogy, and inflects her answers with references to Charles Baudelaire (French writer, dead) and Gabriel García Márquez (Colombian writer, alive) and Woody Allen (American director, barely alive). She’s probably smarter than you—unless you’re fluent in Portuguese and can swear in Arabic—though she would never say so.

She is not only smart but also talented: With a mix of Colombian and Lebanese ancestry, she has developed a mighty mixture of the two vocal traditions, with a vibrato she shakes like her hips. On top of her willfulness, her intelligence and her talent, she also has the best hips in music, though she would never say so. She laughs easily, cries easily, tucks her bare feet under her when she sits, and says “fricking” instead of “fucking” because Catholic inhibition prevents her from swearing. She’s lovely, as long as you don’t tell her she can’t do a concert in Argentina.

And Shakira is not only a star, she’s also a tutor. For much of this spring, she was teaching Americans to speak Spanish. Ever since Ricky Martin lived la vida loca in 1999, Top 40 radio has been less like McDonald’s and more like Taco Bell. Rappers toss in an ay mami here and there, or step aside for a guest spot from Fat Joe, who’s Puerto Rican, and there are Spanglish radio hits by Daddy Yankee and Frankie J. But “La Tortura,” the first single from Fijación Oral 1, isn’t bilingual, it’s purely Spanish. So MTV aired a Making the Video in her native language with English subtitles. For a moment, MTV looked like PBS.

The song is a witty, playful, sparring duet with Alejandro Sanz, who’s less well known to most Americans than Horatio Sanz, despite being a star in Spanish-speaking countries. Singing the role of his lover, Shakira berates him for having a mistress, a custom she says “is so common in Latin America that it’s almost embraced as picturesque.” Ever since her first album, recorded when she was 13, her songs have described relationships as a wonderful agony and love as a spell that turns the bearer into un perro faldero, a tagalong dog, as one new song puts it.

“Women are all the same. We’re just trouble.” The singer, 28, is sitting in the roomy kitchen of her parents’ waterfront house in Miami Beach, at twilight, wearing jeans, a sheer white linen shirt and some gold jewelry.

“I think it’s punishment from God to have put men and women on the same planet. Only for having stolen a simple apple, we received the punishment. Women are full of buttons, little buttons, millions of buttons. And men have just the on and off switch. Men need only food and you-know-what. We need so much more. We’re like—what do you call them? Barrels without bottoms. There’s no way to satisfy a woman. Ever.”

Does that include you?

“Yes, I am trouble. Trouble is my middle name!”

In the living room, watching TV, sits her boyfriend of five years, Antonio de la Rua. She wrote Laundry Service as an extended love note to him (the couplet “To buy more thongs/And write more happy songs” summed up her delight). He’s a full stepladder taller than she is, an amiable, dark-haired lawyer in an Izod dress shirt, with a cellphone constantly pressed to his ear. His father, Fernando, was president of Argentina, though one nonpartisan watchdog group described his tenure as “hapless,” and he resigned in December 2001, after two years of economic crisis, fleeing in a helicopter as protesters fought with police outside the government palace.

“Antonio’s a saint, believe me,” Shakira says, looking at him through a window. “If I had to be him, I would have left a long time ago. I’m a drama queen. Drama is my last name.” She laughs. “Trouble’s my middle name, and Drama is my last name. Shakira Trouble Drama.”

Like her music, Shakira’s life is full of conflict and theater: Even making an album involves tears and torments and tantrums. “Every day, I suffer over decisions. People around me see me cry and see me very insecure. I guess I don’t feel like I’m delivering a baby if I don’t feel the pain and the contractions, you know? It’s a masochistic way of living a career.”

“She’s obsessed with work,” says Sanz, her duet partner. “She thinks about songs 24 hours a day. Plus she’s female, and Latin American—so she has everything she needs to be highly emotional.”

“She’s a tortured soul and she struggles over every bit of it,” adds producer Rick Rubin (Audioslave, Red Hot Chili Peppers), whom she consulted while choosing songs and hiring musicians. “Very few pop artists are such auteurs, with such a vision of their whole sound. But she second-guesses herself, and tries things a million different ways.”

“I should have been a theater actress,” Shakira says, “but I have way too many inhibitions.”

Inhibitions? Is this the same woman who onstage wears leather pants that fit her like a snake’s skin, and pumps her bare midsection like she’s waiting for her turn on the pole?

“Oh my goodness, you don’t even know. I’m so shy. Super-shy. The most shy person in the world. No, not the most shy, but probably second-most,” she laughs.

“My body, for example? I’d die if someday a paparazzi catches me coming out of the shower and takes a picture through a window. I would never go out again in the street. I would change my name, my passport, my social security …

“I don’t like to be explicit about my sexual life. I don’t talk about it and I don’t like to make references about it, but I believe in sensuality. Sensuality has to be every woman’s flag. I can’t say that’s how I’m gonna think in 30 years. Maybe when I’m 50, I’ll be a whore.”

Antonio, cellphone in his hand, tells Shakira they need to leave for the airport instantly or they’ll miss a flight to the Bahamas, where they live. Blender asks him, is Shakira as dramatic as she claims to be?

“Yeah, totally,” he says sheepishly.

So what does he do when it gets bad? “Stay away. Give her some massage,” he giggles.

“Oh yeah,” Shakira trills. “He gives the best massages.”



Blender first met Shakira in October 2001, before the release of Laundry Service, when her fame was contained to areas south of the equator. Her English was slightly more awkward and accented then, and she was puzzled by the way Americans responded to her. “They ask me if I’m Britney Spears,” she said, sitting on the terrace of a Miami hotel. “Twice a day. ‘Are you Britney Spears? Can you give me an autograph?’”

What a silly comparison: Shakira would never marry a backup dancer. Though she’s diplomatic about it, she also makes it clear, now, that Britney is not her peer: “I don’t find common places between her and I, besides the fact that she’s blonde. And the difference is,” she laughs, “she’s probably a natural blonde, and I’m not.”

Shakira says her popularity is based not on her dancing or her body (“I don’t look like a model. I’m not six feet tall or anything”) but on but her mind. “That’s the part of myself I can count on. After all, it’s a man’s world. That’s the best tool you can have. When you see a woman shake her ass, it translates immediately as anything but intellect or sensuality. But in the Hispanic world, there’s a clear understanding of who I am.”

When she dyed her hair blonde, sang in English and sexualized her videos, some old fans called her a vendida, a sell-out. But Gustavo Cerati, a respected Argentinean rock musician who produced two songs on Fijación Oral 1, cites Shakira as a role model for the next generation of Latina singers: “It’s easy to see a lot of cartoon, Disney pop stars here. It’s different with her—she’s involved in the production and the writing. Now a lot of women in Latin America are writing their own songs too.”

“Normally, female Latin artists are a little bit dull. She’s not a puppet—she’s a real musician,” says Sanz.

The booming Latino population of the U.S. is up to 40 million, making it a desirable market for peddlers from politicians to Pepsi. But most established Spanish-language stars who have tried to cross over to Anglo audiences have either started fast and fizzled (Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, Enrique Iglesias) or failed horribly (Paulina Rubio). “She’s the only one who can make the crossover in her own way,” says Cerati.

And beyond that, Shakira—multilingual, half-Latin and half-Arabic—is the embodiment of globalization, the digital-age demolition of national boundaries author Thomas Friedman calls the “One Big Thing” now guiding politics and economics.

“The world’s shrunk,” Shakira reflects, sitting one afternoon in her house in the Bahamas, moments after finishing a rehearsal and before packing for a four-day vacation in Turkey. “The planet was never smaller, no? I do feel global. I feel like a citizen of the world.”

She followed Laundry Service with Fijación Oral 1, rather than with an English record, in the hope that American radio and TV would play Spanish songs. “It’s more possible now for Spanish records to spread than it would have been five years ago,” says John Ivey, program director of radio powerhouse KIIS-FM in Los Angeles. “The tide is turning.”

Living in two different worlds has required a doubled set of talent and will. Shakira’s syncretic gifts began in Barranquilla, Colombia, a northern port town. She heard Donna Summer’s disco songs, which she liked because they were “so contagious.” She heard Middle Eastern music from her father. While her girlfriends adored Milli Vanilli and New Kids on the Block, she listened to Metallica, using headphones in literature class to hide from the nuns, though since she didn’t speak English, “the lyrics were all blah blah blah blah.” At 13, her puberty was electrified by Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” “I told my mom, ‘Every time I hear that guitar riff, I feel this weird thing in my stomach.’”

She made her first record after cornering a Sony music executive in a hotel lobby and insisting on an unscheduled audition, but her teenage albums were not successful, partly because they were scandalous. “The first songs I wrote were dramatic love songs. A 13-year-old girl singing love and hate songs was a little radical. Some people thought I was a 30-year-old woman. And there were local critics who weren’t into the idea that a young girl was singing such dramatic love songs.”

Her father, William, owned a jewelry store, but went bankrupt. From one of the many Arabic families that settled in Colombia, he had seven children from an earlier marriage before meeting Shakira’s mother, Nidia. Even as a girl, Shakira was indomitable.

“I had my first boyfriend when I was 12, and my parents knew about it. My dad was very jealous. I had an older sister in medical school, and he would not let her wear tight jeans.

“I sat down with my dad and told him, ‘Listen, I like this guy. I’m gonna be his girlfriend whether you like it or not. Do you want to know about my life? Or do you want me to hide what I do?’ He said, ‘Okay, I want to know about it.’

“I never went through an adolescence, when kids become rebels and do drugs. I was always a good girl.”

Her parents are still rarely far from her, either physically or mentally. “My parents have been the center of my universe for a long time. You know, I’m almost 30—I’m almost on the third floor!—and I still listen to them. I’m the only child in my mother’s marriage with my dad, so I’ve been overprotected sometimes. But it’s weird, because I have a very dominant personality as well. It’s like a paradox.”



When Shakira was 2 years old, an older half-brother, William, died in a motorcycle accident. “That’s actually my first memory of my life. I remember the exact moment when my parents got the news.” As a result, she has always been terrified of death, and also obsessed with it.

In the last year, her first manager, Patricia Tellez—“more than a manager, my sister, probably the best friend I ever had”—died in her sleep of a heart attack. And a friend from Barranquilla died from cervical cancer at only 32. “This is going to be a very tragic article,” Shakira says with a resigned laugh.

“The Pope died; what can we simple mortals expect? Life is just a second, but we have to make it seem like 10 minutes.”

To deal with her fear of death, she began to see a psychoanalyst two years ago. “It’s like a guided trip inside myself. I’ve gotten to know the many different corners of my labyrinthine mind. It’s helped me grow—though that doesn’t mean I’m mature!” Analysis led her to the title of her new record. In the fall, she’ll release a companion English-language CD, titled Oral Fixation 2.

“I never overcame that initial stage in every life, which is the oral fixation stage. I’m still there. I’ve always lived through my mouth, like a person in jail lives through a window. It’s my biggest source of pleasure: what I say, what I sing, the kisses I give, the chocolate I eat—which is,” she adds, “a lot. My new resolution is to find pleasure everywhere, no matter how.”

On the cover of Fijación Oral 1, Shakira poses in an off-white slip dress, part virginal bridal gown and part honeymoon negligee, and holds a baby near her bosom. “She would’ve been breast-feeding,” says manager Ceci Kurzman, “if it weren’t for having to stock the record in Wal-Mart.”

The photo is a mixture of innocence and fertility, a twist on Latin and Catholic iconography. Of course, in pop music, as in Freud, “oral fixation” has another, more sexual connotation.

“I knew it could be a provocative title,” Shakira admits. “But the word oral is very vast, and that’s what I like about it. Through our mouths we discover and explore the world. Our mouth is the first source of pleasure, right?”