 While Britney
always likes to sexually provoke her audience, Shakira, vulgar,
confident and full of fun, likes to invite it. With a huge multi-faceted
voice, back-of-the-throat ululation to girlish falsetto, eye-catching
belly-dancing routines and eccentric lyrics, Shakira joined the
party with the hit album Laundry Service in 2001 and never left.
For her follow up to the massive success of 2005's Oral Fixation,
Shakira has recruited some of the hottest producers, including the
Neptunes and John Hill. The result, She Wolf is short but bursting
with ideas of groove, carnality and loads of hooks.
Shakira's genius can be measured by the fact that when we were all
obsessing over vampires, she was thinking of werewolves. The title
track, a delightful mesh up of a '70s disco bass, heavy breathing
and wolf noises, is perhaps the most catchy, properly crazy single
to come out in recent memory about a woman going on late-night man-hunts
in order to revenge herself on an inconsiderate lover. In the video
we see Shakira exploring a pink fleshy cave, then humping a cage
floor and singing, "A domesticated girl that's all you ask
of me/Darling it is no joke, this is lycanthropy/Moon's awake now,
with eyes wide open/My body is craving, so feed the hungry."
'Do It Again' is a wonderful mid-tempo Neptunes production with
an "eh-eh-eh-eh" hook, marching band percussion and lyrics
about that guy you keep going back to though you know you really
shouldn't. It also features a hook that sounds like something Meg
Ryan's tries to do in the infamous scene from When Harry Met Sally.
'Long Time' is a sparse, slow party tune, which you can either sleep
to or dance that slow lusty dance, with a bass drum, slight hints
of piano and a clarinet solo.
'Mon Amour', inspired partly from Blondie, is a noisy hunk of stadium
rock on which Shakira wishes her ex and his new girlfriend a terrible
vacation in Paris. "Hope the French fleas eat you both alive,"
she sings, "And your room smells, and the toilet doesn't flush,
and the locals treat you mean, and the service takes too long."
'Men In This Town' is an energetic '80s-style electro stomper, except
for a catchy chorus and the revelation that "Matt Damon's not
meant for me" and then delivers a coda threatening suicide
in a multi-tracked falsetto.
Things slow down with 'Gypsy' that starts out with a guitar and
tabla combo that sounds like something out of an old Indian movie
and turns into a country song, complete with mandolin and strings.
Elsewhere, Wyclef Jean guests on the funky 'Spy', a naughty number
with a jumpy, bopping bassline, a wacky vocal hook and trumpets.
For all the poetic oddness of Shakira's lyrics, her sexual preoccupations
reveal a willingness to pander to pop stereotypes rather than challenge
them. But when it comes together, as it does in She Wolf; the result
can be so inventive and surprising, you can hardly believe your
ears.
*****Get
it NOW!
****Just get it
***Maybe maybe not
**Just download the best song
*Forget that this was made
|
