In early 2001, Shakira was holed up on a farm in Uruguay, surrounded by her close family and a herd of cows. She’d just spent the last three years touring and performing across Latin America, establishing herself as a pop goddess with a rockera edge. Now she was convalescing in a quieter place, trying to write an album for an English-speaking audience that would somehow preserve the spirit of her trenchant pop-rock—all without forsaking the legion of Latin American fans that made her a pop luminary. It seemed to be an impossible task.
Over the next year, Shakira would confront this challenge head-on, embracing the totality of transition. The video for “Underneath Your Clothes” was the Colombian singer’s self-aware introduction to Anglo audiences. In the opening scene, a thirsty journalist chases after her through the Palace Theater in Los Angeles, her newly blonde—but still tousled—braids silhouetted under an oversized Brixton cap. He asks, “Shakira, Shakira: What’s it like to crossover and sing in English?” The rockera launches into a breathless monologue in Spanish about music’s ability to create a spiritual connection between spectators and performers, about the poetry of music beyond the artificial borders of language. As she walks away, the reporter begs, “Oh, but in English!”
It’s unlikely that such a calculated, performative exchange would appear in a Latinx artist’s English-language debut today. But back then, industry conventions dictated that Shakira be explicit in her approach. As she told MTV’s Making the Video, “I wanted that scene so badly in the video, because it’s something that is daily bread in my life lately.” Today, listeners around the globe are a bit smarter, less receptive to such overt maneuvers when artists are navigating new audiences. But we have only begun to challenge these stale tropes—and question the fantasy of “boom” narratives, where Latinx artists appear and disappear every few years based on their legibility to Anglo audiences.
That clear-eyed intentionality at the beginning of “Underneath Your Clothes” was the crux for her metamorphosis into an international supernova. Long before the Beyoncé collaboration, the World Cup anthem, and the forays into watered-down reggaetón, Shakira Mebarak Ripoll proudly used her versatility in her favor. As she told Colombian daily El Tiempo in 2001, “Fusion offers me the opportunity to remove any type of label people want to place on me. It gives me freedom...I don’t want to be tied to a specific style and become the architect of my own prison.”