On the cover of her new album, Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, the Colombian pop singer and songwriter Shakira plays Eve, clothed only in strategic leaves. Perched next to her in a tree is a baby girl, reaching for the apple Shakira holds in her hand.
For obvious reasons, it's eye-catching, as was the cover of the Spanish-language companion album Shakira released in June, Fijacion Oral, Vol. 1, which showed her fully dressed and holding the same baby to her breast.
Although it had been four years since her previous album, Fijacion Oral, Vol. 1 zoomed to No. 4 on the Billboard pop charts.
As an attention-getter, a pop star showing skin needs no further justification. Yet Shakira, 28, has other ideas about her latest chosen image. "I want to attribute to Eve one more reason to bite the forbidden fruit, and that would be her oral fixation," she said in an interview. "I've always felt that I've been a very oral person. It's my biggest source of pleasure."
"From a psychoanalytical point of view, we start discovering the world through our mouths in the very first stage of our lives, when we're just born," she continued. "The first album cover is more Freudian, and the second one more resembles Jung, because Eve is a universal archetype. I tried to keep a unity between the two album covers, and I chose to use some Renaissance iconography. Mother and child and original sin are recurrent concepts of the Renaissance period, and I wanted the historical character."
Psychoanalysis, biblical revisionism, Renaissance paintings. Not to mention DNA-level multiculturalism, torrid dance moves and an ear for rhythms and hooks from all over. Fulfilling the basic needs of current pop -- a catchy song, a pretty face -- doesn't begin to match Shakira's gleeful ambitions. She is pop's 21st-century Latina bombshell, a sweetly upbeat face of globalization, and then some.
"I'm not the one who's causing this to happen," she said. "I'm just a consequence of the great musical momentum and the great changes we are going through in the world."
And she just might seduce the world. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Colombia, wrote, "She has invented her own brand of innocent sensuality." Chatting over Indian samosas and chicken tikka, she seems candid, confident, light-hearted and completely disarming.
In her new single, Don't Bother, Shakira sings about being rejected in favor of a woman who's tall and "fat-free," but insists she'll get over it. The video clip, after a flashback of lovemaking in the shower, shows her taking vengeance: She has the man's car crushed.
"Did it hurt?" she said, laughing, curious about a male viewer's reaction. "A man's car is like an extension of their ego and their manhood. I thought this would be a video that would make women say, `Yeah, yeah!' and it would make men feel" -- she gave a pained sound: "Ohh!" She giggled.
Songs and videos "exorcise the bad things that could happen to your relationship," she said. "Inside me there's a real jealous beast I'm trying to tame."
"I think art, music should be sensual," she added. "Not necessarily sexual. I think that's a huge difference between that N and that X. It's more than the 11 letters of difference. Sensual is everything that refers to the delight of the senses. And that's what artists do, is stimulate the senses in any possible way. I don't think I have to hang myself a little sign that says, `Hey, I'm sexy,' and then take it off and now say, `Hey, now I'm serious.' I can just fluctuate and oscillate from one side to the other whenever my instincts tell me to."
No boardroom plan for crossover success could have devised a figure like Shakira. Her mother is Colombian, her father Lebanese; in Arabic, Shakira means "woman full of grace." She speaks Spanish, Portuguese and English, and wants to learn more languages. She calls herself a nomad; she has houses in the Bahamas, where she now lives, and in Miami, while she still regularly visits her hometown, Barranquilla, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Her Middle Eastern side comes out in vocal arabesques and belly-dance moves, but she's also steeped in rock, pop and disco; the first album she owned, on a cassette, was Donna Summer's Bad Girls.
Shakira has been in charge of her own music for a decade. She began writing songs at eight and was signed to a recording contract at 13. In Bogota, she made two albums of Latin pop that, she said, "don't represent me at all." She had a brief stint acting in a Colombian soap opera; she doesn't think she was very good at it. Then, with Pies Descalzos ("Bare Feet"), released in 1996, Shakira started producing herself with collaborators she chose.
She added: "I don't want to sound like a feminist saying this. But it's true, it's a man's world."
Shakira was already a star across Latin America by the end of the 1990s. So she set out to learn English well enough to write lyrics, and she conquered the rest of the world with Laundry Service, which sold 3 million copies in the US and an estimated 10 million more worldwide.
Fijacion Oral, Vol. 1 reconnected Shakira with her longtime Spanish-speaking fans. Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 includes English versions (though not direct translations) of two songs from Vol. 1; the other nine are new. Perhaps because the songs are in English rather than Spanish, the music moves closer to Anglo rock and pop, dipping into folk-rock, power ballads and the Cure. "Sometimes a melody suggests in what language that song should be written," she said. "I just learned to listen to what the song wants to tell me."
Rehearsal beckoned. In a few days, Shakira would be singing the songs in public for the first time. "Just today," she said, "I'm starting to get in touch with the songs from the performer point of view. OK, how am I going to interpret this with my body? How am I going to start to have now a physical relationship with my songs?"
The band kicked into Hey You, a flirtatious song with a 1960s Merseybeat bounce. In it, Shakira offers herself to a man as everything from queen to cook to slave: "I'd like to be the owner of the zipper on your jeans, and that thing that makes you happy." As she sang, she stood still at first, then let the music carry her. Her shoulders start to roll, her feet picked up the rhythm, and soon her hips started to swivel.
"My hips tell me where and when I should move," she had said before returning to work with the band. "And my hips don't lie -- my hips tell me the truth."
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