The girl with the four-way hips. Why is she so much more loveable than her peers and contemporaries? What separates her from blanded-out Britney, lofty Madonna, the terminally deluded Mariah, or nasty little upstarts like Pussycat Dolls?
Well, for a start she seems all about the music. I mean, how could you not love a girl who hammers the crap out of a drum kit to the tune of ‘Back In Black’ in her live set. Yes, she’s mad as a bat – as anyone who’s scanned one of her lyric sheets will testify – but there’s also a beguiling honesty in her songs: whereas J-Lo and co are obsessed with branding and rebranding themselves as sellers of used cars, clothes lines and ringtones, sashaying around spraying the latest fragrance samples upon their public, Shakira takes the time to write tunes that admit fallibility, insecurity and jealousy.
Case in point: the single ‘Don’t Bother’, which musically could be Cher’s big haired pop-rock bombast with a Coldplay/Edge guitar break tacked on, except for the lyric – a hissy throwdown to a rival for her suitor’s affections. Or more pointedly, her admission in the solitary slow dance of ‘Your Embrace’: “Tell me what’s the use of a 24-inch waist/If you don’t touch me?/Tell me what’s the use again/Of being on TV every day/If you don’t watch me?”
So much for affairs of the heart – she also gets religion. ‘How Do You Do’ is superior soft rock dressed up with choral vocals, but the subject matter is heavy jelly, a Davidian venting that shares lyrical territory with Patti and U2: “What language do you speak, if you speak at all/Are you some kind of freak, who lives to raise the ones who fall?”
Then there are a handful of mid-tempo ballads that act as comfort food for the love-starved. ‘The Day And The Time’ is perfectly polished but understated MOR with a Killers-cribbed synth break that might sound odd in your kitchen but a tonic on the radio. ‘Illegal’ is a wronged-woman ballad that, if I’m not mistaken, features Carlos Santana noodling away on guitar (sorry, no liner notes). And both ‘Sometimes’ and ‘Dreams For Plans’ are breast-beaten and crestfallen in a way that has far more to do with The Carpenters than diva-strop histrionics. Sure, Shakira’s contralto warble may sometimes sound like she’s got a string of spaghetti wrapped around her epiglottis, but the cumulative effect is endearing rather than annoying.
Of course, sometimes she’s just plain freaking batty, as on ‘Animal City’, a bizarre Egyptian shimmy garnished with Mariachi brass and the kind of twangy Mexican border guitar so beloved of Roberto Rodriguez. Or ‘Hey You’ – Shirley Bassey sucked into a Warner Bros cartoon and singing lines like, “I’d like to be the owner of the zipper on your jeans” in a brassy Marilyn mewl. Or ‘Timor’, which, despite the socio-political sentiment, distils everything dodgy about '80s pop (Laura Branigan meets Rockbird-era Debbie) into a three-minute blip.
But these are entirely forgivable trespasses. Round here, we’ll always cut Shakira all the slack she needs. And Oral Fixation Vol. 2 ain’t no guilty pleasure.