Shakira

Shakira thrilled everyone when her English-language debut went platinum. But she's no prefab crossover goddess, she's undeniably talented, writing all her own songs. Fun is the rule -- the barnstorming "Objection (Tango)" slides dizzyingly through tango to punk and back and Middle Eastern influences adorn "Eyes Like Yours (Ojos Asi)."

On the spanish-language albums that elevated her to Latin-rock-goddess status, Shakira
Mebarak sounded playful, bohemian and rebellious. On her English-language debut, she
sounds downright silly, but the blame is not entirely hers. Surrounded by a battalion of
producers and songwriters, the twenty-four-year-old yodeling diva can't quite overcome
the pedestrian nature of most of the material at hand, the bulk of which she co-... More >

Vulgar, confident, full of fun, this is the Cher album Cher never made--must be that Middle Eastern blood. Christian Middle East it may be (Cher's Armenian, Shakira Lebanese), but the intensity of the vibrato is more Islamic than Iberian. On the other hand, the stylistic appetite of this Colombian superstar is pure rock en Español--nothing like Andean-where-she's-Caribbean panpipes for a soupçon of inauthentic authenticity. How freely she deploys her freshly mastered English--the corners the Anglo-Saxon consonants put on her Latin gush, the slightly misbegotten metaphors, the awkward, carnal, unhesitatingly female chauvinist "Underneath your clothes/There's an endless story/There's the man I chose/There's my territory." And as you might expect, her voice swallows contradictions as easily as it switches timbres. (Grade - A-)