Review #496: Dónde Están Los Ladrones?, Shakira
#496: Dónde Están Los Ladrones?, Shakira
Merry Christmas from Karla Clifton! I got you another album review.
The most important thing I know about Shakira is that “Hips Don’t Lie” broke up the Fugees. The second most important thing is that she was named in the Paradise Papers for tax evasion and settled. Also, I know that she recently broke up with the guy she met on the set of the video for “Waka Waka.”
But the stuff I didn’t know about Shakira could fill several books. For instance, I didn’t know that she hated her first two albums so much, she basically tried to scrub them straight out of existence. (Though the Internet is forever.) Then her third record put her on the Latin American musical map. Facing extraordinary pressure to deliver, she hooked up with Emilio Estefan to produce. The title of the record, which translates to Where Are the Thieves?, was inspired by a time that a piece of her luggage was stolen — which happened to include a number of lyrics she was working on.
I have only ever known Shakira as a Latin artist that sang in English, but this album predates that: she was an exclusively Spanish-language artist from Colombia. This album fuses so many different genres and styles together it’ll make your head spin: she mixes mariachi horns and guitar (“Ciego, Sordomuda”) with Middle Eastern melodies and rhythms (“Ojos Asi”). Then she throws you for a loop and becomes a Nineties rock bitch — she does a great Alanis impression on “Si Te Vas,” complete with growls and howls. “Inevitable” sounds like a Spanish take on Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch.” “No Creo” sounds like if Madonna’s Ray of Light had teeth. And titular “Dónde Están los Ladrones” had the most pop punk guitar I’ve ever heard.
Of course, Shakira gives her fair share of brokenhearted love songs here — see “Moscas en la Casa” and “Que Vuelvas” (which also features some badass guitar, for good measure). On Shakira’s MTV Unplugged performance (which happened to be the first Spanish language Unplugged ever!), she introduced “Sombra de Ti” by saying (in Spanish, of course) “This song was born at four o’clock in the morning in a recording studio, with the lights off and my heart broken.” Even the optimistic “Tú” sounds moody and downtrodden, in true Nineties bitch fashion.
After this record, Emilio’s wife (and more famous half) Gloria Estefan convinced Shakira to take a stab at recording in English, believing she had the potential to be an international superstar. So Shakira learned English by analyzing the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Walt Whitman. And the rest, as Shakira’s hips would say, is history. She appeared on an episode of Dora the Explorer, and voiced a character in Zootopia. When they want you to be in children’s cartoons, you’ve pretty much peaked.
Fun Fact: Her live performance of “Octavo Día” got her in some trouble nearly five years later, on tour in support of her first English-language album, because she performed it in front of a video with mascots of G.W. Bush and Saddam Hussein playing chess. I had no idea Shakira was such a badass! Still has to pay taxes, though.
Review #497: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, Various Artists
