-OpEd-
BOGOTA — In late March, the Colombian pop star Shakira was on a media tour in New York City to promote Las mujeres ya no lloran (“Women No Longer Cry”), her first album in seven years: on March 25, she performed a free concert in Times Square for some 40,000 fans. The next day, she was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where the host asked her where her howl originally come from.
“From my gut,” she said, laughing before adding pensively, “wolves howl not only when they’re in pain, when they’re in danger [but also] as a way to communicate and to connect with their pack. And that’s how I feel that I communicate with my audience, through my music.” Her fans are her pack.
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But she did not explain what it means to be a wolf in Colombia or the double standards that come with her self-proclaimed wolfhood.
Nor did she talk about her 2009 album She Wolf (called Loba in Spanish), which initiated one of the most successful strategies in her career as a songwriter and businesswoman. By then, she had already been on the global music scene for a decade and conquered the much-coveted Anglo-Saxon audience “up north.”
But the transition changed the meaning of Shakira, as she began to connect with a global audience through stylized body movement. Latin American Studies professor Nadia Celis says that after 2009, Shakira perfected her dance routine to communicate with a public “she could not address in her own language.”
She-wolf emerges
Fans who knew followed her since her 1991 debut album Magia, were perplexed: both excited by the talented singer’s global triumph — something no other Colombian musician had achieved — and upset by the crazy-looking blonde Shakira who had replaced the black-haired philosopher they knew and loved. How dare she? Who’d have thought it? Why sell out? Each question prompted more. Colombian poet and academic Mónica Gontovnik wrote at the time about the phenomenon of mourning a defunct identity.
In any case, when Shakira came out that year as a wolf, with straight, blond hair and with lighter eyes, those with acute sensitivity to aesthetic and social-class norms began objecting to the stylistic choices and brazen hip movements that were both innocent and indecent.
The nation Shakira has created, where all her fans live on an equal footing.
Loba wasn’t a best-seller. But the gesture, which was both daring and planned, became a precedent in defying the Colombian custom of calling woman considered indiscreet, showy and vulgar a loba or “she-wolf.” Shakira also likes this popular image even if she does not insist on it as her exclusive identity.
Part of the pack
Walking one recent rainy day in Manhattan, I took cover on a street corner to wait for the rain to pass. I could hear a loudspeaker nearby blaring out Puntería (the first single from Shakira’s new album) just two days after her Times Square concert. An elegant New York woman was singing the chorus next to me, in her so-so Spanish, while messaging on her phone.
We’re a pack, and we’re with you.
I had a patriotic pang just then, not for Colombia, but for the nation Shakira has created, where all her fans around the world live on an equal footing, freed of class, language and stylistic stratification. Our Shakira — the singer with elaborate lyrics and complex melodies we fondly recall — remains alive in today’s superstar.
Her songs are still there, and we can sing them to ourselves to remember it all. But Shakira the songwriter, doubling as capitalist, generous donor and injured and reborn she-wolf, is done with the old, parochial debates. She has shown both erudition and expertise in her art, and an unending creativity that has weathered all the technologies to make her a booming business.
Today, Shakira’s fans need only hear one of her songs to start howling along as she wolves — is it magic or shape-shifting?We give into her lewd gyrations as we relax the body and slightly unbutton our pants. We can breathe at least. The howl perhaps means nothing to some, but Shakira knows what her voice is saying, as will any Colombian girl. So I can tell her, we’re a pack, and we’re with you.
