Shakira in Wall Street Journal
A Complicated Case
But breaking through in the U.S. is tough. The singers driving
the Latin music craze in mainstream America, such as Christina
Aguilera, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez, tend to be born or
bred in the U.S. Shakira is a more complicated case, a lifelong
Spanish speaker who hails from the grimy Colombian port city of
Barranquilla and who didn't visit the U.S. regularly until well
into her teens.
There's also the danger of eroding the base on which
Shakira has built her career. Sony Music Entertainment Chairman
and Chief Executive Thomas D. Mottola says he is confident that
Sony has waited until the right moment to make its move, though
it could take more than one album to for her to establish an American
audience. But at the same time, he realizes that making Shakira
into a camera-ready U.S. pop star could spur a back-lash in the
Latin markets where she has achieved the rare status of being
both commercial and credible. "By taking that leap,"
he says, "you may risk destroying the thing that you've built."
As a child in Colombia, Shakira absorbed a jumble
of musical influences that would rather inform her own musical
style. There was Colombian pop and folk music; Arabic music that
her Lebanese father, a writer named William Mebarak, brought into
the house. Rock-and-roll reached Colombia via radio or music videos,
which were finding their way into households around the world
by the late 1980s. The first tape she ever owned was Donna Summer's
disco landmark "Bad Girls." The second was a compilation
of Arabic music from her father. Her musical tastes eventually
embraced a broad spectrum of styles from Depeche Mode to the Cure
to Tracy Chapman and Nirvana.
She began writing little songs at the age of eight
and quickly latched onto the idea of a life in show business.
"I knew that I was going to be a public figure", she
says with a unblinking earnestness. "It was like a prophecy."
She got a break a decade ago, when the head of a
local children's singing group helped arrange an audition for
a Bogota-based Sony executive who was passing through town. Shakira
performed a capella in a hotel lobby. She won a second audition
at Sony's office in the capital and a recording contract at 13.
Her first two teen-pop records failed to generate
big sales. After a detour as a television actress, Shakira set
out in 1994 to make a more adult-oriented album, convinced at
the age of 17 that it was her last chance to prove her worth to
Sony. She insisted on being involved in the record's production,
so she could learn her way around the studio.
The payoff was 1996's "Pies Descalzos"
("Bare Feet"), a breakthrough with both the marketplace
and Sony. At a meeting of the company's Latin American managers,
a video for Shakira's catchy pop song "Estoy Aqui" ("I'm
here") turned a few important heads. Executives from different
countries or regions use such meetings to gauge whether they can
cross-market acts beyond their home territory.
"This was the first time we had seen Shakira,"
recalls Frank Welzer, president of Sony Latin America. "We
said, 'This is an immediate priority for our region.'"
So the company started pushing Shakira, in a small-scale
version of the process that would be repeated for the U.S. and
the rest of the world. Helped by the singer's new fans at Sony,
"Pies Descalzos" shot up the charts from Argentina to
Mexico. When Shakira played her first concert in Brazil, where
nearly all the records sold are in Portuguese, she was stunned
that the crowd sang along in Spanish. She quickly learned Portuguese.
The Wall Street Journal 2-13-01 Cover Story
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