To say that I grew up with Shakira’s music would be short.
I have sung her music countless times in Karaoke, she has accompanied me in love breaks, helped me learn English and even inspired me to rebel from my parents.
When as a journalist I met her in person last week after her concert in Miami, she took me for a while I was in front of her, my idol, the woman who composed what I would describe as the soundtrack of a whole Latin American generation.
Shakira granted the BBC an exclusive interview and access to what happens behind scenes of their successful tour “Women no longer cry.” I, a fan (also Colombian), I was the producer of that story.
While acting as a journalist, I was lucky to see her sing and dance “La Tortura” with Alejandro Sanz during the sound test. A few hours later, I heard her in her interview with our music correspondent, Mark Savage.
Seeing it closely is strangely familiar. It is a person whose image the music and advertising industry have been in charge of reminding us.
But it is also a discovery, and one cannot resist the temptation to stay looking at it, trying to compare it with their own memories.
My fan self, was interested in looking for in his gestures and his words the wisdom that allowed him to write verses as “you will see how the same life goes to opt for the salt that is left over in the sea” or “I always knew that it is better, when you have to talk about two, start with yourself.”
My journalist, on the other hand, was immediately perplexed with the size and complexity of the company behind the artist.
The writer
De Shakira stresses that he is an artist with a cultivated intelligence.
His lyrics, his melodies, his videos and concerts synthesize creatively a wide range of influences, from rock to belly dance through the African sounds of the Waka Waka.
He knew how to use the gaze, perhaps exoticing, which was put on her being a woman from Colombia to create a truly universal work.
Not many artists can say that they did the largest concert of their careers in Cairo and that a few years later the GNP Seguros Stadium in Mexico City was eleven times.
The Spanish speakers are fortunate to learn especially to the Shakira writer, my favorite.
“I like writing with images and telling stories using metaphors and similes, not being so direct, and also using a little fantasy,” he told us in the interview.
The writing is about choosing the precise word, and Shakira is an author who has no modesty to use all the resources at her disposal to say what she wants. In a song he talks about Sartre and Marx; In the following he says “You changed a rolex for a casio”; Then in another it addresses labor exploitation.
When they ask me to explain why I am their fan, I usually say that it has been a fundamental piece in the construction of my imagination.
I could not live the same without what I discovered in “anthology”, “wolf” and “eighth day.”
When his interview with the BBC ended, Shakira stared at me and extended his hand to say goodbye.
I admitted him that he was a big fan. That word, “fan”, had an effect. He changed his face, and decided to replace his farewell with a handshake with a hug.
She says that this tour is a reunion with her fans, who held her during the years in which she faced her stormy and media break with the footballer Gerard Piqué, while accountability before the Spanish authorities accused of fiscal fraud.
Something of the incessant roar of the audience during the two and a half hours that the show lasted in Miami confirmed it to me: this is something that she and her fans have been waiting for many years.
The businesswoman
If seeing Shakira on stage singing and moving the hips in the midst of wet heat is admirable, seeing what has to happen behind scenes so that this is possible is no less.
To each city, the Tour arrives with about 150 people. The equipment weighs about 250 tons.
It is clearly a monumental concert. Shakira changes 13 times clothes. Take two days to build the stage. Each segment is accompanied by a visual universe and music occurred practically from scratch.
For all that to develop without setbacks, there must be perfect coordination. An error can trigger a significant delay, or worse, a cancellation, as happened in Boston and Washington DC (according to Shakira’s team, for causes outside it).
In that complex coordination, there is a key that we soon discover: all the people of their team told us, in some way or another, that Shakira is aware (and command) of everything.
One of his publicists told us that he complained one day because he was not told that someone had become ill. His guitarist clarified that his work does not consist in showing off his skills with the guitar, but in touching so as not to distract Shakira and that she is the one who shines.
In that complex control gear, there is friction and not so friendly moments.
Shakira’s team, for example, strictly controlled what we could and could not record.
“You can’t record during the sound test,” he repeated a severe voice several times for the stadium’s high speakers when one of the security employees took out his phone to record Shakira.
Her team knows what to expect from us, journalists: curiosity and difficult questions. Therefore, they try to anticipate and take care of what she says to the fullest.
At the moment she enters the interview, everything happens fluently and calmly. The negotiations have been had before and will be taken later.
In other words, there are a group of people who are responsible for giving, closing doors and enforcing their will so that she can devote himself to smiling and being charismatic.
The rebel?
In “Barefoot, White Dreams”, the song that gives its name to its 1995 album, Shakira listed some expectations that were placed on it: “Fulfill the tasks, attend school. What would the family say if you are a failure? Always put on shoes, do not make noise at the table.”
Since then, at 17, it made it clear that he did not feel comfortable following the social conventions of a conservative society like the Colombian.
Let the hair be painted, to sing in English, to play the battery were things that the public at the time looked with some strangeness. His music was somewhat anomalous coming from a country more accustomed to offering tropical music to the world.
Videos like “The torture” and “Wolf” were scandalous.
But all that story, all that way, allowed Shakira to get used to her audience that she was something different from a polished pop diva.
Much of the furious, fiery, pure Shakira, is certainly alive. Even now your own makeup is still doing in your own way. His session 53 with Bizarrap was a daring insult full of humor and ingenuity that he launched despite the criticisms that could come to him.
But of course, in the process of reaching the top and being a woman who invoices (about US $ 6 million every night), Shakira has also become an increasingly perfected cultural product, in which each ingredient must be controlled and beautiful.
Your show is the perfect show of it. It is impeccable.
The question that remains to me, after a day knowing the world that surrounds it, is what space is for the rebel Shakira with which I grew up in the Shakira Pulida, which directs a millionaire company and breeds two sons.
I hope some.
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