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JAUME DE LAIGUANA*
Since 2022, Shakira’s personal life has publicly played out like a gripping soap opera that simply won’t resolve. The saga began in June of that year, when the Grammy-winning Colombian superstar announced the end of her 11-year-old romance with Catalan soccer player and father of her two children, Gerard Piqué. Despite adopting a civil tone in a press release issued that summer, he responded in 2023 with a tabloid-ready diss track, detailing their breakup (and Piqué’s infidelity) in excruciating detail: the electro-pop atomic bomb ” BZRP Music Sessions #53”, recorded with the stellar Argentine producer Bizarrap.
This track appears on Women Don’t Cry Anymore, Shakira’s last kiss to say goodbye to the chapter of her life. Translated as “Women No Longer Cry,” it is the singer-songwriter’s first studio album since the release of her 2017 LP. The Golden- and a fierce, unfiltered reclamation of years spent inundated by writers’ block and angst. “As I wrote each song I was rebuilding myself,” Shakira said in a press release. “As she sang them, my tears transformed into diamonds and my vulnerability into strength.”
Since Shakira dropped pop-reggaeton gold on The Golden, Latin American music has reached commercial heights once considered unfathomable in the United States. In the ensuing years of reggaeton’s peak global prominence, Colombia alone has produced many acts that have disrupted Anglophone supremacy in pop music, including J Balvin, Maluma and Karol G. Puerto Rican trap master Bad Bunny surpassed them all and then helped pave the way. so that his collaborators, Mexican artists such as Natanael Cano and Grupo Frontera, take their rightful place on the world stage.
One might think that this crowded Latin music landscape would threaten Shakira’s relevance. But in 2020, at her historic Super Bowl halftime show with J.Lo, she pulled out all the stops: She shook her hips, pounded the drums, and played the opening riffs of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” on the guitar. (In case you forgot she knew how to play the axe). Then, upon winning her MTV Vanguard Award in 2023, she belly danced while she brandished knives and got Taylor Swift headbutted in the crowd.
Leave Women Be her testament: Shakira taught the new wave of Latin music everything they needed to know to maintain star power. And just as Gloria and Emilio Estefán welcomed Shakira into her Miami home to help her achieve success, first with her 1998 rock album. Where are the thieves?, then with his first album in English, 2001 Laundry service – uses of shakira Women to share his enormous spotlight with a diverse roster of artists, songwriters and producers who studied his playbook.
Opening with the help of her longtime fan, Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B: “I don’t care if she wants me to meow, I’ll do it.” the Bronx MC said in an interview — Shakira gets straight to the point with the sweet, radio-friendly nu-disco “Puntería.” She serenades a cowardly Cupid in Spanish, lamenting the disaster he has wrought in her life: “Tu tiene bien aiming” or “You have a great aim.”
Shakira also taps into the well of Latin songwriters and producers who have grown alongside her collaborators. Bad Bunny producers Tainy and Albert Hype bring a haunted tropical feel to “Nassau” and “Tiempo Sin Verte.” Naisgai, right-hand man of Puerto Rican space balladeer Rauw Alejandro, gives “Cohete” a crystal-clear dance-pop sheen. Before Shakira worked with ASCAP-winning songwriter Keityn, she wrote “Tusa” for Karol G.
Bizarrap, who mixed Shakira’s dance songs “Vol. 53” and “La Fuerte,” formulated his own genre of EDM fusion with his YouTube series BZRP Music Sessions, in which pop stars and rappers live out their Ibizan fantasies in his studio. With such a powerful arsenal of Latin talent in WomenDJ Tïesto’s big-room remix of Bizarrap’s masterpiece doesn’t feel like a grand finale, but rather a trip down memory lane.
Shakira’s moody ’90s rocker resurfaces for a while on her free-spirited guitar ballad, “How, Where and When.” She sighs anguishedly in Spanish: “There’s so much stuff lying around in the cities / Like trash in the seas / There’s no one honest left / Only drunks in the bars,” giving the alt-girls just a dose of the devastating verses and prickly riffs. We fell in love with classic songs like “Inevitable.”
Shakira dusts off her cowboy boots in not one, but two Mexican music collaborations; the first since his flirtation with mariachi in 1998’s “Ciega, Sordomuda.” He becomes vulnerable with Texan musicians Grupo Frontera in “(Entre Parentesís),” a dejected cumbia reminiscent of his 2001 love triangle-themed song “ Objection (Tango)”. She takes revenge on “El Jefe”, a passionate corrido with Fuerza Regida; told from the perspective of Shakira’s nanny, Liliana Melgar, whom Piqué allegedly fired without compensation; The song draws attention to the plight of domestic workers and the people who exploit them. “You have everything to be a millionaire/Expensive tastes/The mentality,” La Loba jokes in Spanish, with her claws wide open. “You are simply short of salary.”
Of the 15 tracks, seven have already been released since 2022, limiting the number of surprises and headline-grabbing moments upon the album’s release. For example, “TQG,” the poisonous duet that Shakira recorded with pop-reggaeton idol Karol G, already appeared on the young singer’s hit album. Tomorrow will be niceand won the Parceras couple a Latin Grammy for best urban fusion/performance in 2023. But stocking the album with proven tracks is better than resorting to cheap tricks to achieve virality, like another barely-in-Spanglish single with a problematic American, or wait until 2025 to serve us a microwaved 20th anniversary remix of “Hips Don’t Lie.”
Women is a collection of pop genre fusions, but Shakira manages to win the court on every song with her incisive and enduring musical ability. She could have easily gone the rest of her life without releasing another album and instead showcased her ubiquity in single after single for eternity. But an artist with a legacy like Shakira’s, on par with Anglophone pop titans Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, should define her own eras accordingly.
In Women Don’t Cry AnymoreShakira can finally turn the page on these tempestuous last two years and reintroduce herself, not as Shakira the soccer mom, nor as Shakira the heartbroken == but as Shakira, fucking Mebarak, international pop icon and undefeated champion.