Vanity Fair

SHAKIRA
THE SPITFIRE

Singer, songwriter, actor, super-estrella.
Five albums, two platinum; one Grammy; two Latin Grammys; official goodwill ambassador of the Colombian government.
At age 11, Shakira was kicked out of her school choir because her voice was too strong. At age 13, the exotic, lissome beauty left her coastal village for Bogotá with dreams of becoming a model. Instead, she scored a record contract and a role on the popular soap opera El Oasis. Eleven years and five albums later (not to mention a tabloid-fodder romance with Antonio de la Rúa, the son of Argentina's president), she is the most popular female singer in all of Latin America. Her love songs are unconventional and witty, full of self-analysis and irony- "I offer you my waist/ And my lips should you want to kiss them/ I offer you my madness/ And the few neurons I have left"-and her voice owes more to the jagged little thrills of Alanis Morrisette and the get-it-while-you-can emotion of Janis Joplin then to the Tejano stylings of Selena or the urban pop of Jeninifer Lopez. With the release this month of Laundry Service, her first English-language album, Shakira may well prove to be Colombia's greatest export.

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