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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