Personally, out of all these pop stars, I only know Mariah and Shakira. I don’t care about the rest: they never inspired me. You heard them once, you heard it all and thats about it. I’m already bored the third time round at the very latest. I’m talking about Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Britney, J.Lo, whoever you wish to throw at me. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate their different qualities and talent: Britney is a fantastic dancer, J.Lo is actually a good actress, Beyoncé inspired financial independence, Rihanna is the cool kid….but Mariah and Shakira hit different (as you’d say in L.A. I suppose). Mariah is THE last diva that we’ve got and Shakira is the only She-Wolf we ever had.
Shakira came as a new species of woman
Mariah was my first love. I always wanted to sing like her, be confident like her and actually look like her. When I was 15 I took the Butterfly cover to my mum’s cousin who was a hairdresser and asked to have exactly that hair colour. She said girl, that wont work, this is light and retouch and what not. I didn’t understand any of it and I didn’t care. If its on the picture, why cant I have it? That was my logic. I was pushy. In the end, let’s just say that the next day at school, everyone said I look like Mariah Carey. That was probably one of my happiest memories of school. I will forever think that her big hair curls in the Sweetheart video is the prettiest a pop star has ever looked like. Until I saw Shakira with her wet hair coming out the ocean like a brand new species of woman.
What is fascinating about Shakira is her realness and her vulnerability. Let’s unpack the situation, Shakira has dedicated so far three tracks targeted at her ex Gerard Piqué. People in the comments say things like “guuurl don’t do that, it’s not classy, you are just empowering him and his tart”, but Shakira is not all about etiquette. She talks too much, she talks about pain and hurt and she is pretty logical and intellectual at that. But Shakira is a wild woman.
She embodies the tremble and the stability of the earth, the burn and warmth of fire, her intellectualism is the wind whispering wisdoms and the waves of the water are forever shaking in her hips. She is an animal.
A she-wolf. A wild woman who is not afraid to be vulnerable, not afraid to be furious, angry or perhaps even jealous and effin hurt! She feels betrayed, her love was abused and you don’t betray with mother earth. She opened up her heart and poured it all out for the world to see. She literally showed us her hole in her chest! With tears in her eyes she roamed the streets to show us her raw, unfiltered, gory pain. The wound is still sore, the blood hasn’t dried up yet. She let’s us see other people trampling on her heart. Shakira is not pretending to be above it all. Yes, she has enough self love and self respect to not allow it to happen again, she won’t huddle by a cheater’s feet. She is not coming out of it as the winner with attitude, no: she locks up her heart in a save deposit box and carefully carries the key with her. She is not ready to give her heart away again.
Now, with more distance, she is back on her feet and hits us with another diss track. This time she is revealing more of the situation, even addressing her mother in law, that girl Clara is getting dragged, she mentions tax fraud allegations… she drops it all. A Lebanese Latina from Colombia and you think she is gonna let it go?
Shakira is the type of She-Wolf that will seek solitude in nature, crawl her nails into the resourceful, hot earth of her ancestors, gather all her energy and put a spell on you with all the strength of her voice.
She gonna sing it out loud and a record breaking number is going to hear and sing along. Do I care about what really happened, who ate whose jam and so on? No, not at all. All I see is a wild woman who is not afraid to hold back for the sake of an image, like so many others did before her. “I can have another you in a minute and in fact he’ll be here in a minute”… No girl, that’s not it. That’s just arrogant and a lie. And I’m fully aware that Shakira is being ever so slightly belittled by the media but let me tell you this: a wild woman is never playing by their rules and that amount of talent paired with her fearless freedom of spirit evokes plain jealousy. But there will always be those that SEE her and feel her. Ultimately, I see no flaws with this woman other than falling for the wrong man. When she sings she is out of his league, boy is she right. Shakira is out of most people’s leagues. Get jealous or get inspired, up to you. I’ll leave you with this iconic performance.