A Barranquilla poet became Latin pop’s global crossover
Born 2 February 1977 on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll signed with Sony’s Colombian arm at fourteen. Her first English album in 2001 moved more than thirteen million copies—still the sales peak for a female Latin artist—after two Spanish-language breakthroughs in the 1990s.
Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll was born in Barranquilla on Colombia’s Caribbean coast on 2 February 1977, the only child of her parents, with Lebanese and Catalan ancestry and eight older half-siblings. She wrote a poem at four and her first song, Dark Glasses, at about eight, inspired by her father hiding his grief for a son killed in a motorcycle crash. That same year her father’s jewellery business went bankrupt, and she came home from a stay with relatives in Los Angeles to find the cars and furniture sold.
At four she heard a doumbek drum in a Middle Eastern restaurant and climbed onto a table to dance, and she was soon belly dancing for classmates on Friday mornings. The school choir turned her away because her vibrato was too strong. At ten she won a bicycle in a TV talent contest, and a theatre producer steered her to a Sony Colombia executive, who signed her at 13 for three albums.
Her debut, Magia, sold only 1,200 copies in 1991, and Peligro also failed, though she took third place at Chile’s Viña del Mar festival in 1993. The breakthrough came with Pies Descalzos in 1995, which sold over 5 million copies and led to a two-year tour of about a hundred shows. Dónde Están los Ladrones?, made in 1998 at the Estefans’ Miami studio, topped the US Latin chart for 11 weeks and sold over 7 million.
Laundry Service, her first English album in 2001, sold more than 13 million copies, a record for a female Latin artist. Later hits include Hips Don’t Lie and the World Cup song Waka Waka, and she holds four Grammys and fifteen Latin Grammys.
Source: Shakira
