Lingua inglese - Pretty voice

Much more than just a pretty voice

Shakira: The Latin pop diva with a political message

Siobhan Grogan meets Shakira, the Latin pop diva who is known not only for her music but also for her political messages. 15,000 New Yorkers look startled as Saddam Hussein strokes his chin and considers his next chess move. Across the table, George Bush waits his turn. A single spotlight moves away from the actors on the big screen to the stage below, searching out Shakira, the newest, blondest pop diva.

"I know pop stars are not supposed to stick their noses into politics," she says, shrugging. The screen above her head next reveals Bush as a hooded Grim Reaper and Saddam's puppeteer, controlling the chess game below. This is hardly subtle social comment, but it is daring for a pop concert in a city still with a painful scar in its altered skyline. Shakira may have sold 12 million albums and accepted the "Latin Britney" tag, but this is not the behavior of a pop princess.

"Sometimes people don't want to see pop stars giving their opinion about politics. They think pop stars are made to entertain. I come from Colombia, a country that has been in a slow, subtle war for 40 years. Growing up with this makes you have an opinion. It was a little risky to use my show to deliver a message - many people around me told me not to do it - but it was a statement about love and what I feel this world and its leaders are lacking."

This explanation unwittingly betrays the contradictions behind everything Shakira does. While she wants to make serious political observations, she feels it necessary to couch them in less controversial words about love. She points out the control she has over her own career: writing and producing her own material, learning English so that she would not need someone else to translate her lyrics. Yet she seems equally at home pouting for men's magazines.

Shakira's beginnings and career

Shakira was born in Barranquilla, an industrial town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and she moved to Miami eight years ago. "I have always been aware of the situation in Colombia," Shakira acknowledges. "A five-year-old child there knows what a guerrilla is. They probably know who Mickey Mouse is, too. They are aware that there is injustice."

Her first song, "Your Dark Glasses," was a tribute to her father ("My idol," she declares). Aged just 14, she released her first album, Magia, comprising songs she had written between the ages of 8 and 13. In 1995, her third album, Pies Descalzos, sold 4 million copies, and Shakira the pop star was born.

Encouraged by Latin diva Gloria Estefan, she spent the next two years studying rhyming dictionaries, the poems of Walt Whitman and the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, hoping to learn English. "I had to find a way to express my ideas and my feelings, my day-to-day stories, in English." She then went to rural Uruguay to write her debut English-language album, Laundry Service. Even more significantly, she dyed her black hair blonde on the eve of the album's release in 2001, to the disgust of a number of her original fans. It was a fuss over nothing, she says. "I'm not pretending to be American. How could I? I am Colombian. I would never abandon the Latin community."

The Guardian Weekly 20-2-2002