E-Mail This Article to a Friend Global face Shakira’s rise out of Colombia BY JOSH KUN
	Related Links Shakira's official Website Josh Kun on Shakira in 2002. Carly Carioli reviews Shakira’s Laundry Service.

A couple of months ago, Colombian pop star Shakira stopped by The View to promote her new Fijación Oral, Vol. 1 (Epic). There was no sit-down, just a rendition of her single "La Tortura" on a catwalk stage. Her trademark froggy hiccups were in full flight as she treated the TV crowd to a string of epileptic chest pumps and accomplished abdomen undulations — the same moves she shows off in the song’s video as she slides over kitchen countertops and humps hardwood floors to win back the attention of an unfaithful lover. He’s played by Alejandro Sanz, who belts the song’s killer chorus.

There was, however, something missing from The View’s re-creation. In the middle of the video, Shakira dumps black oil on her body. In a quick close-up, we watch as she dips her hands into the oil and, almost ritually, covers her face with it. The torture of infidelity, it seems, leads to blackface and "blackbody." It’s when she’s blacked up that Shakira dances the hardest, popping her chest to the point of snapping. The dancing is, it’s clear, lifted from West African traditions. But she told the press it was a style all her own, one she described as "tribal."

Her performance of a self-invented primitive blackness is thrown into even greater relief by the song’s Afro-Caribbean reggaeton backing. Although now known as a Puerto Rican style, reggaeton is actually a Panamanian-Jamaican mix born of Jamaican laborers brought to work on the Canal. When reggaeton began, it was an explicitly black, working-class form with Afro-Panamanians like El General leading the way. On Fijación Oral, Shakira includes a more explicitly reggaeton version of "La Tortura" and claims it as her own. She calls it "shaketon," a word that in Mexico is slang for masturbation.

African-derived music has always played a role in Shakira’s sound. She is, after all, the product of Baranquilla, a Colombian carnival capital with a rich post-slavery cultural legacy. Shakira was never a representative of black Colombia, but she was still legit as a pop artist, born of a South American mix of European, African, and Lebanese cultures. But with 2001’s Laundry Service (Sony), it was out with the Spanish and in with the blond hair and a Pepsi contract. She wanted to conquer America, she liked to tell magazines, the way the Spaniards did. The move didn’t go unnoticed. When I spoke to a group of black Colombian girls after Laundry Service was safely at the top of the US charts, they talked about Shakira with sadness, as if something had been lost in her transformation.

Critic Rob Tannenbaum has called Shakira "the embodiment of globalization, the digital-age demolition of national boundaries." He’s more right than he may know. Shakira is the perfect example of what corporate globalization does to cultures around the world: it creates commercially viable products based on local traditions in a manner engineered to erase them. Shakira can be read as "global" precisely because she is no longer read as Colombian. She demolishes national boundaries because she’s got a worldwide contract with Sony, she’s no longer another young singer in a developing country where national boundaries are as real as kidnappings and car bombs.

In this context, being "the embodiment of globalization" is also a euphemism for having marketable pan-ethnicity, or, more bluntly, for not being black or Indio. Shakira would not be accepted as a citizen of the world if she were dark-skinned — just ask any Afro-Colombian champeta singer. Her compatriot Carlos Vives tried to pull the same trick, but the former soap star kept indigenous Colombians in his band and videos. Which I suppose makes "La Tortura" an honest video in the end — a how-to guide for the international pop set. Dance like an African but claim the move as your own, then cover yourself with oil to show how easily blackness can come on and off.