Can Shakira Conquer the World?

NEEDLESS TO SAY, THIS was not the last night of Shakira‘s record. She’s messed with She Wolf endlessly, because she cares so much about it succeeding. “I know that this is my moment in America,” says Shakira, who is already a global superstar with 50 million records sold and earnings of over $100 million — even if she isn’t quite in Beyoncé territory here. “This is my chance to consolidate a career and my dreams as an artist in the U.S., so that I can continue making music for a long time and traveling the world.” This might sound cold and calculated, but for Shakira, this is an emotional moment: After this tour, she wants to start a family. “And that’s less an intellectual decision than a physical calling,” she says, a glimmer of excitement passing over her face. “My body feels like it is asking to reproduce, to have a huge belly and carry babies. And when the baby comes, I don’t want to be in the middle of 100,000 projects.” 

She Wolf is only Shakira’s third album in English, and she didn’t even speak the language until the late Nineties — she taught herself, listening to the rhythms of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan songs. “It’s interesting to me that in my teens, I was a rock chick, listening to Nirvana, Aerosmith and Tom Petty, and there was no Latin influence in my music at that time whatsoever,” she says. “When I started singing in English, I went in search of my Latin and Middle Eastern roots, experimenting with fusion and other cultures. Now, I really want to be free to do anything that I want to do sonically. I think dance music today has a lot to oiler in that sense.” Says Sam Endicott, lead singer of the Bravery and co-writer of “She Wolf,” “Shakira is open-minded. I love that she howls in ‘She Wolf.’ It’s so bizarre and cool.”

In September, after the “She Wolf” single didn’t catch fire on U.S. radio – it rose to Number 11 but never broke the Top 10 — it seems that Shakira and her label went into high gear to get a single that would. A day before the Video Music Awards, on September 12th, Amanda Ghost, the head of Epic and co-author of Shakira’s song “Gypsy” — a possible third single from the album — says she got a call from Timbaland to visit him at Trump Palace. He wanted her to hear “Give It Up to Me,” a track he had in mind for Shakira, even though the She Wolf album was ready to ship. “I hate changing plans,” says Ghost, “but the music business is the Wild West right now, so I’m ripping up the rule book and starting again.” She played the song for Shakira in the car on the way to the VM As, and they made a decision to push the release of the album from October 12th to November 23rd. “We said, ‘Fuck it all,'” says Ghost.

The drama didn’t stop there. For “Give It Up,” Shakira filed her parts remotely, writing the lyrics on a car ride during her promotional tour in Germany and taking one of her days off in London to record. At first, it looked like Timbaland would take all the rap parts on the track, but then they hired Flo Rida to cut them instead — and then, says Ghost, “Everyone’s breath was taken away when Lil Wayne said he wanted to jump on the record.” Even though Lil Wayne and Shakira now share billing on the song, they’ve met only once, briefly, when they landed at an airport in the Bahamas at the same time. “This is the modern approach to things, with so little time and so much going on,” says Shakira, laughing prettily. “I guess I’ll see him when we shoot the video.”

Shakira is one of the best flirts in the world, and that laugh is part of it, a long stream of rapid-fire giggles that are so cute they could come from a baby unicorn. She has two faces: on one hand, just totally adorable, as much of a coquette as her belly-dancing would imply; on the other, a pushy, difficult diva who doesn’t mind throwing the world into chaos as long as she gets her way. This is how it can be with powerful women, and it’s not the most enlightened way to be, but Shakira considers herself a die-hard feminist. She surrounds herself with “strong, determined, fighting women” and can rant at length about the injustices faced by her gender. She is excited about the “She Wolf” video, which features porno-contortionist moves inside a giant pink vagina, but she was taken aback when her mother wasn’t thrilled about it. “I was surprised at first and thought about how her fans and Colombians were going to view it,” says her mother, Nidia, calling from Colombia. After all, She Wolf is largely about the difficulty of women satisfying themselves in a world where men are in charge. “We live in a society that represses women’s subconscious dreams,” Shakira says, her eyes narrowing. “You know, women have to make enormous efforts through life, much larger than men. We deal with so many pressures: the pressure of aesthetics, and how society wants us to deliver our performances as mothers, daughters and wives. And then, on top of it, we must sweat it out at the gym trying to get rid of cellulite.”

That’s on the agenda today too: While she’s waiting for her engineer to finish the mix, Shakira grabs a black leather bag of gym clothes and heads to the back of a studio, where a petite trainer has set up a gym for her to train two hours a day. Dozens of elastic bands hang from the ceiling, and a step machine is set up in front of a mirror, ready to do its part in her daily diet of a zillion squats. “I do them until my leg is going to fall oil,” she says. “I never went to the gym before in my life, but at 32 I notice that my body responds negatively to bad food, so I must make double the effort.”