“Gerard may be ten years younger than me but sometimes he’s ten years wiser,” she says, proudly. While she sings the praises of loving a younger man - Spanish football star Gerard Pique - her compliments aren’t what you might expect. “At least that’s what mine tells me, which is a great relief, because I will always have a little bit of extra fat here and there.”Īpparently her ‘extra fat’ is well appreciated. And besides, men like to have something to grab onto, right?” she says, laughing. “We should be happy with who we are and with our own bodies. A lot of pictures, well not a lot of them, all of them, are photoshopped to hell! I think that girls shouldn’t be too influenced by magazines. “I’ve always been a big advocate of curves. The award-winning singer and judge on the US version of The Voice is angry about the inaccuracies of women’s portrayal in the media. “She was too slim and stylised and so I told the directors she had to be a little curvier, she needed bigger hips if she was going to be based on my persona.” In the upcoming animated movie, Zootopia, in which she voices the character of Gazelle, the Hips Don’t Lie songstress insisted on making some physical adjustments to her character. Shakira's Latin beats, spiced with Middle Eastern and other world elements and made comfortably familiar by being churned through the pop machine, make you feel like a citizen of the world - albeit one who traipses through the clubs of Miami, Barcelona, Cape Town or Havana, dressed in linen with cocktail in hand.NO ONE can accuse Shakira of not taking her image seriously. But in times where national boundaries are being fiercely defended and cultural differences become points of contention, perhaps we are desperately in need of a beat that can break down barriers. Her 2010 single became the theme song of the FIFA World Cup in South Africa and the video has since racked up well over one billion views.Īs a UNICEF ambassador and founder of the Barefoot charity for kids in Colombia, Shakira's activism has focused more on education than politics. The salsa beats in her 2006 megahit "Hips Don't Lie" transported us to the palm-tree-lined squares of Havana, while "Waka Waka" made us all feel like Africans. To create her signature dance style, the superstar is able to draw on her diverse cultural heritage - having tapped into her Lebanese background in particular to master the art of belly-dancing. Her Colombian-born mother had Spanish and Italian roots, while her father was born in New York to Lebanese immigrants.
Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, on February 2, 1977, as the youngest of eight siblings. And maybe we can't sing like Shak, a wunderkind who wrote her first song at age eight. So maybe we can't dance like Shak (see #ChantajeChallengeContest). "But the stylistic breadth of Shakira's music - elements of folk, Middle Eastern and traditional Latin styles over a foundation of rock and pop - gave her a degree of credibility the American teen queens lacked."Īnd perhaps that - besides her sheer vocal and dance talent - is what makes Shakira not only the inevitable superstar, but also all the more relevant in times of insular politics. She was already a big star in Latin America, but with her North American breakthrough at the beginning of the 2000s, "some people associated the Colombian singer with her American pop-music contemporaries Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera," wrote music magazine "Rolling Stone."
While with her midriff tops, skimpy dresses and erotic moves and lyrics, she may not embody the emancipated modern woman - and certainly didn't in 2001 when she stormed onto the US music scene with her steamy "Laundry Service" video and run-of-the-mill pop album of the same name. A quick scan of #ChantajeChallengeContest offers a few moments of what the Germans would call "fremdschämen" (being embarrassed for someone else) - and proof that at 40 Shakira herself still has the world's fastest, sexiest hips.