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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Shakira busy planning new album and dance moves

By Juan Forero
Washington Post

BARRANQUILLA, Colombia — As a second-grader, Shakira Isabel Mebarak Rippoll's dream was to join the choir at the prim-and-proper Maria the Teacher Catholic school in this tradition-bound Caribbean city. But the music director felt that her potent voice would overwhelm the syrupy cadence of other children.

"My voice was strong and I wanted to sing out loud, and he didn't think I was the right choice for the choir," she recalls. "And he never let me be in the choir. It was such a huge frustration."

She found solace with her parents, who encouraged her to enter local singing competitions. Soon she began racking up the trophies. And in her early teens the diminutive girl with the throaty, commanding voice struck out on her own.

Having long shed her last name and dyed her black hair blond, Shakira is now a 30-year-old swivel-hipped bombshell, Latin America's most successful crossover artist. Last fall at the Latin Grammy Awards, she won four of the five awards for which she was nominated, including female pop vocal album of the year, song of the year and album of the year for "Fijacion Oral Vol. 1." But coming off the follow-up "Oral Fixation Vol. 2," her second English-language album and featuring the smash single "Hips Don't Lie," Shakira is entering territory that, for other global stars, has sometimes resulted in cookie-cutter music and artistic oblivion (see: Ricky Martin). The question is whether the pressures to produce top-selling albums will check the inventiveness that some music critics say has set her apart from other sex-shilling pop stars (see: Britney Spears).

"In every artist's career at that level you're faced with challenges — the challenges of what to do to invent, how to reinvent yourself," says Jose Tillan, a programming and talent executive at MTV Networks Latin America. Some rising stars "crash and burn. They believe the hype and that they're always going to be at the top of their game."

Shakira seems all too aware of the pitfalls as she wraps up an arduous worldwide tour and embarks on the long process of sketching out lyrics for her new album and creating new dance moves for her carnival-like concerts. "That risk is there," she says. "We let ourselves be tempted with fame and the glitters of popularity. ... The risk becomes greater when you start repeating formulas, when you stop competing against yourself. When you lose authenticity. When you don't rely on your own feelings. When you let yourself be absorbed with the outer world, and you lose contact with your inner world."

Shakira prizes her success, of course — "once you reach the top positions in the radio chart, you want to stay there" — and revels in all those flattering magazine shoots and videos that hype her beauty and sex appeal. But in a recent interview, she showed a more thoughtful and intellectual side than might be expected.

Shakira was once compared to Spears, a fellow bottle blonde also known to gyrate like a belly dancer. But the comparison ends there. Shakira is moved by politics and the world around her. She tortures herself over her music — producing, at times, sophisticated lyrics that explore such themes as poisonous resentments and the existence of God. Then there's that voice — deep and sultry one moment, a poignant alto the next, which exudes an experience and pain that seem well beyond her years.

Not even 5 feet tall, she still looks like a teenager and can be completely disarming. She sounds almost schoolgirl innocent as she speaks about her boyfriend, Antonio de la Rua, son of a former Argentine president.

But she's read Walt Whitman and can hold forth on topics as divergent as Freud, Colombia's civil conflict, existentialism, human vulnerability or her rock heroes, Bono and Depeche Mode. She learned English only a few years ago but speaks with adventurous aplomb, peppering her speech with colorful, sometimes oddly poetic metaphors.

She is a shrewd entrepreneur and demanding taskmaster of what has become a one-woman industry that includes not only beefy bodyguards and stage-hands but her parents and other relatives.

"She writes all of her songs," said Archie Pena, a drummer and songwriter who has worked with Shakira since she was 17. "She's involved inside and out, in every single detail of the songs, the album, the performance, her dresses. She's not one of those artists that everybody does something for her. She actually comes up with the ideas herself."

Shakira's story began in this port city of high-rise apartments, turn-of-the-century mansions and gritty warehouse districts along the Caribbean coast. The daughter of a frustrated writer of Lebanese descent and a Colombian mother, Shakira wrote her first song at 8, "Your Dark Glasses," about her father. Two years later, she was certain she wanted to be a singer. It seems that one of the singular events in her life was the night her father, William Mebarak, took her to a local Middle Eastern restaurant; hearing the traditional Arab drum, Shakira began to dance.

"The musical roots Shakira has come from my family," Mebarak said proudly. "In my family there was music. There is still music."

By 13, Shakira was recording in a Bogota studio. Her first two albums were quickly forgotten, but then in 1996 came "Pies Descalzos" ("Bare Feet"), which sold 4 million copies.

She hit it big with "Donde Estan Los Ladrones?" ("Where Are the Thieves?") in 1998. The album was nominated for a Grammy, and the song "Ojos Asi" ("Eyes Like Yours"), won best female pop vocal performance.

Her first English-language album, "Laundry Service" in 2001, sold more than 13 million worldwide and established her internationally. The two "Oral" CDs were both in the top five on Billboard's U.S. album chart.

When asked about particular songs, she eagerly recollects how the words came to her. A song called "Shadow of You," for example, came in a storm of creativity at 4 a.m.

"That's beautiful, when in music or in art in general, you have those miraculous moments," she explains. "There's no rational factor involved, and the miracle of art or music just happens and you're just a witness to it."