Shakira! Shakira! Shakira!


To while away the hours I’ve dumped a ton of Pop Music onto my I-pod. It’s a guilty pleasure, for sure. That Shakira single is boss – riddled with naffness, but to be honest, being a bit crap is an essential part of pop, I think. Take Dusty Springfield’s cheesy “I love you so,” at the end of the perfect The Look of Love as an example.

Shakira, though; What a pop monster! The single “Hips Don’t Lie” is great. Infectious, sexy, short, more hooks than a butcher’s fridge but Christ the lyric is pants! Not that it's important but I think if you're writing a pop song you can at least come up with some decent words. You only need about 12 lines... That the song is by Wyclef--that should be enough in itself, but it gets better. Wyclef sings “Stop fighting” all the way through. Who’s fighting? Shakira and her legion of salsaing admirers? Nope. Oh, it’s ‘Clef, because he’s from Haiti and he’s still a ‘Fugee” at heart. He's the people's poet - keeping a nation together while talking about Shakira's dance moves. Utter Tosh! The guy is minted – money coming out of his ears. The last time this bloke was in a fight it was with Sheryl Crow about who got the next bag of cash for the Amex Sponsorship Gig. But I guess ‘Clef’s keeping it real for all those ‘fugee kids he still hangs around with.

Next, Wyclef sings—when he’s not busy placating the assembled mass of pugnacious Haitians—“She make a man wanna’ speak Spanish,” (And then, to prove a point, in Spanish)”What is your name, pretty? My house is your house.”
Shakira, replies with, “Ooh baby when you talk like that, you make a woman go mad.”
Ladies, tell me: is that really all it takes?
F*** me! I’ve been studying the Tang Poets in Mandarin in the hope of being able to pitch a little woo. I’ve definitely been overthinking things if you can say 'My house is your house' in Spanish and you pull Shakira…
There’s also a great line where she sings. “Oh boy, I can see your body moving, half animal, half man.” Manimal? Shakira likes Manimals?

Freaky.

Still, if you see the video it makes more sense. She’s very hot. But she does this thing with her chests; it’s a weird boxy/ in-out dance. The first time she does it, it’s cute. It definitely interrupted me while I was doing the ironing. But, then, in another video, the one where she’s been fixing a car and is covered in oil or something, she does it again and it’s not so cute. I’m all for unusual chest movements—we all need a little pep in our lives, don’t we?—but when its something done with the bold-font subtitle “this is sexy, isn’t it?” for me it loses some of its charm and it becomes a little naff. Shakira doesn’t have to try to hard, but she does: through most of the video, sadly. Having said that I still watch it to the end whenever its on TV, even though I obviously don’t like it….

On a side note there was a kid down my street who did something similar to Shakira with his chest (except he was 11 and didn't have a cleavage). His name was Steven and we used to pick on him mercilessly for having a pigeon chest and for being a freak. I hope he sees the Shakira video and finally feels some validation and takes his weird ribs out dancing somewhere. I’d like to think he’d be proud now, running along the trail blazed by Shakira, undulating his thorax in time to whatever music he's into. I hope he’s not another drunk with a shattered, lonely, unconsummated life because of a childhood marred with abuse about the shape of his body.

Hips Don't Lie is one of my four favorite songs of the year so far. Maneater by Nelly Furtado, Ain’t No Other Man by Xtina and Don’t Cha’ by the Pussycat Dolls are the others. I think all the songs are ruined by their videos – which make them perfect in a pop sense, I guess. Each one of them tries to hard to be sexy—like they were produced by men my age trying to make things hot and edgy. What’s with Nelly Furtado losing her dog and then leading an underworld S&M club in some dance moves? Why are those women rolling around on the bed in the Xtina video? The Pussycat Dolls are really only Nicole, aren’t they? Or maybe that’s just me missing the point. The other Dolls don’t seem to do much apart from some crap dancing. (However, maybe one of them drives the van, the other one knows how to fix the keyboards, one books the gigs, one does the tour accounts…. ? I don’t want to be presumptuous…).

Cee-Lo wrote Don’t Cha’. I felt vindicated when I heard that. What a burden it is to be a snob.

That three months ago I was listening to Neko Case and Emiliana Torrini and now I'm on Pussycat Dolls and Shakira. Whatever next?