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"  Bathed in pulsating pink light and surrounded by high-tech digital signage, Shakira takes the stage of the Palais des Festivals in Cannes. Best known for its annual film fest, the Palais is playing host this January afternoon to rehearsals for the NRJ Music Awards, which may mean nothing to you and me, granted, but is positively \u00E9norme in France. The Colombia-born singer, who divides her time between homes in the Bahamas and Miami, is tiny, almost doll-like\u2014 &amp;quot;cuddly,&amp;quot; as her Cockney driver gushed to me the day before in London\u2014just 5&amp;#039;2&amp;quot; in her green Asics running shoes, pajama-style maharishi pants, and leather hoodie vest. Having spent the previous night working on a new song that will feature Wyclef Jean of the Fugees, she&amp;#039;s operating, according to her manager, on just three hours of sleep. &amp;quot;Two!&amp;quot; Shakira corrects her, crouching at the edge of the stage. Then she flashes me a sweet, almost bashful, can-you-believe-my-crazy-life? smile.  It&amp;#039;s a perilously disarming smile too, it turns out. Because as the ominous throbbing bass line of her propulsive new hit single, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t Bother,&amp;quot; comes pouring through the sound system, the smile vanishes and a stunning transformation takes place. Grabbing the microphone, Shakira begins to prowl the stage like a tigress stalking a hapless bunny. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s got the kind of look that defies gravity,&amp;quot; Shakira sings, addressing an ex who has apparently dumped her for another woman. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s the greatest cook,&amp;quot; she adds, narrowing her eyes, &amp;quot;and she&amp;#039;s fat free.&amp;quot;  Shaki, as her fans call her, is a fascinating and uniquely fearless singer, given to wriggling out of key like a blind man darting into traffic and somehow making it across the road every time. To hear her pull off these vocal feats live is thrilling. Meanwhile, tossing her sleepy mane of highlighted Robert Plant curls, she aims her fierce brown eyes at the camera with such smoldering intensity that I almost have to avert my gaze from the big monitor in front of the stage. And that&amp;#039;s before she peels up her T-shirt, revealing her marvelously toned and sunbaked midsection, and begins ever so gently stroking the mic stand.... A moment later, Shakira shades her eyes and looks up at the sound booth. &amp;quot;Less &amp;#039;verb in the monitor,&amp;quot; she says, businesslike, before requesting one more take. Later that evening, after Shakira has picked up an award for best international song, indulged in a little star-on-star small talk with Ricky Martin, and deftly fended off a request from British icon Robbie Williams to &amp;quot;hang out sometime&amp;quot; (she invited him to give his number to her manager), I spot Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas backstage and ask him what he thinks of her. &amp;quot;I want to marry her,&amp;quot; he replies in a matter-of-fact tone that suggests he may not be kidding.  In 2005, Shakira released two complete albums, one in Spanish, Fijacion \u00D3ral Vol. 1, followed by another in English, Oral Fixation Vol. 2\u2014both of which debuted in the top five on the pop charts (the CDs share two tracks but are otherwise separate works). Ever the perfectionist, she&amp;#039;s still tinkering with the second album, recording the Wyclef single for inclusion on a new, special edition of Oral Fixation, which hits stores this month. Though Shakira is often pegged as a crossover artist\u2014a faintly dismissive term usually applied to the most watered-down of genre straddlers\u2014anyone who&amp;#039;s really listened to her phenomenally varied output, which ranges from rock en Espa\u00F1ol to &amp;#039;80s-style new wave, overwrought ballads to bouncy, Bardot-esque French pop, knows that the 29-year-old singer defies categorization. (Her current musical obsession, she tells me excitedly, is a Hasidic reggae singer called Matisyahu.) &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s a connoisseur of music, like myself,&amp;quot; Wyclef says. &amp;quot;I call us music junkies.&amp;quot;   Shakira&amp;#039;s vocal style on her more rock-oriented tracks has been likened to that of Alanis Morissette for its fiery-eyed rage, but the comparison quickly falls apart when one considers gorgeously sleepy ballads like &amp;quot;Something,&amp;quot; from Oral Fixation, or the bossa nova tune &amp;quot;Obtener un S\u00ED,&amp;quot; from its Spanish language counterpart. In a recent encomium on the two releases, a smitten New York Times writer praised her &amp;quot;savvy but nearly unhinged eclecticism.&amp;quot; And legendary Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau, astonished by her barrage of musical references, lovingly deemed her &amp;quot;as big a weirdo as [psych-folk darling] Devendra Banhart, only more talented and more focused.&amp;quot;   Rick Rubin, who executive-produced the two CDs, compares Shakira&amp;#039;s hands-on approach to that of Madonna. &amp;quot;Her stance is on every note,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s in total control.&amp;quot; And she has maintained that control for years\u2014delivering her records on her own schedule (generally with two to three years in between) and cherry-picking from whichever genres speak to her at a given moment. After finding her first major success in Latin America with her third record, 1996&amp;#039;s Pies Descalzos (Bare Feet), she had an international hit in 1998 with the Emilio Estefan-produced D\u00F3nde Est\u00E1n los Ladrones? (Where Are the Thieves?), which included the Arabic-tinged &amp;quot;Ojos Asi.&amp;quot; Following that success, Shakira was emboldened to take on the American market. Wary of giving up any control, she completed a crash course in English so that she could continue to write her own lyrics.   &amp;quot;Shakira&amp;#039;s really defining what it means to be a truly global artist,&amp;quot; observes Sony Music president Michele Anthony, noting that Shakira has been with the company since she began her career, at age 14, as a Latin pop star in the bubblegum, Debbie Gibson vein (in one early video that makes her cringe today, a young Shaki, decked out in elf boots and poufy hair, cavorts in front of an elephant). &amp;quot;When she first came to us, she barely spoke English,&amp;quot; Anthony says. &amp;quot;But somehow she mastered the language.&amp;quot; Her first English-language album, 2001&amp;#039;s Laundry Service, sold a phenomenal 13 million copies around the world. Describing Shakira&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;total vision for herself,&amp;quot; Anthony points out that she not only writes, sings, and produces her own songs but plays guitar and conceives, codirects, and edits most of her videos. &amp;quot;And she does her own hair and makeup!&amp;quot; (To be fair, the singer does have a makeup person on call at the NRJ Awards, if only to carry her lipstick\u2014which Shakira routinely whips out of the woman&amp;#039;s hand and applies herself.) Anthony adds that &amp;quot;La Tortura,&amp;quot; Shakira&amp;#039;s Fijacion Oral megahit, mowed down a cultural barrier when it became the first-ever Spanish-language video to be added into high rotation on MTV and VH1. Then again, the sight of the pop star slathered in Pennzoil, rhythmically thrusting out her chest, and sharing a torrid embrace with Spanish singer Alejandro Sanz may have had something to do with the video&amp;#039;s popularity.   &amp;quot;A lot of people think I like to expose my body, but I don&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; Shakira protests. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just because the dance moves require it.&amp;quot; This coyness may be what her countryman and magical realist master Gabriel Garc\u00EDa M\u00E1rquez was getting at in his much-quoted 2002 profile of her, when he noted that &amp;quot;she has invented her own brand of innocent sensuality.&amp;quot; Just how innocent, of course, is the question. Shakira admits that she recently got word from her Catholic high school that &amp;quot;one of the nuns is looking for me after seeing the &amp;#039;Don&amp;#039;t Bother&amp;#039; video.&amp;quot; And before taping the &amp;quot;La Tortura&amp;quot; video, she consulted a priest friend about whether it would be proper to carry on with Sanz while in a committed relationship with her lawyer fianc\u00E9, Antonio de la R\u00FAa, the son of Argentina&amp;#039;s former president. (The priest gave her the go-ahead.) Even so, she is charmingly insistent that her sultry dance moves are not erotic. &amp;quot;I always try not to be graphic but to be metaphorical,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I think there&amp;#039;s something fascinating about stimulating the senses.&amp;quot;   Wyclef compares her to &amp;quot;one of those intellectual foreign films\u2014she&amp;#039;s sexy, but she&amp;#039;s deep.&amp;quot;   It&amp;#039;s the day before her NRJ appearance, and we&amp;#039;re sitting in the well-appointed library of London&amp;#039;s Lanesborough Hotel. Giving off the fresh, unadorned glow of an adolescent, the singer-songwriter is wearing a Psychedelic Furs T-shirt and sipping a glass of water. Her command of English, despite a late start, is impressive, and contrary to Christgau&amp;#039;s assessment, perhaps the weirdest thing about Shakira in person is how utterly normal\u2014friendly, unpretentious, and just plain relatable\u2014she is despite her global fame, her talent, her intelligence, and her world-famous midriff.   Indeed, Shakira&amp;#039;s modesty can at times seem practically comical. For instance, she insists that she&amp;#039;s deeply shy about her body, nearly jumping out of her chair when I respond with an incredulous chuckle. &amp;quot;Really! I&amp;#039;m a very shy person!&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;At the beach, I&amp;#039;m always covered with a sarong. Sometimes when I see those tabloids and all those celebrities in their bathing suits, I&amp;#039;m like, How can they be like that? I don&amp;#039;t even change in front of my stylist!&amp;quot; Lately she&amp;#039;s become a little more comfortable in her skin. &amp;quot;I think that when a woman&amp;#039;s in her early twenties she&amp;#039;s still fighting with herself, but when she approaches her thirties, she starts accepting who she is. That&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;m going through now.&amp;quot;   Shakira adds that she no longer travels with a &amp;quot;five-person glam squad,&amp;quot; having concluded that the female beauty craze has gotten &amp;quot;pathological\u2014some kind of obsessive compulsion with becoming the perfect woman, not a 10, but an 11. It&amp;#039;s about matching these images that pop culture puts in front of you.&amp;quot; She takes a sip of her water. &amp;quot;I feel like sometimes I&amp;#039;ve been both a victim of that and a victimizer, and it&amp;#039;s not a good feeling, let me tell you.&amp;quot;   She has found a bit of catharsis in a parody of the &amp;quot;La Tortura&amp;quot; video that&amp;#039;s been burning up the Web. It&amp;#039;s called &amp;quot;La Gordura,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The Fatness,&amp;quot; and features an obese actress aping Shakira&amp;#039;s steamy moves while smearing herself with chocolate and gorging on junk food. &amp;quot;Most of those things people send you on the Internet are not that funny,&amp;quot; the singer says. &amp;quot;But this one is real, real funny.&amp;quot;   Born Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll in 1977 to a Lebanese-American jewelry store owner and his Colombian second wife in the coastal town of Barranquilla, Shakira says she had all the benefits of being an only child while also being surrounded by half siblings from her father&amp;#039;s first marriage. She was, it seems, a born performer, belly dancing at age four and writing her first song a few years later, before becoming a talent show regular and honing her craft by touring small towns around the country.  A setback occurred when Shakira was eight: Her father&amp;#039;s business collapsed. Overnight, the family&amp;#039;s color TV morphed into a little black-and-white, and the furniture was pawned. &amp;quot;My father even sold the air conditioners,&amp;quot; she recalls. &amp;quot;I was so pissed. I thought they were doing it on purpose.&amp;quot; In response to her youthful outrage, Shakira&amp;#039;s parents took her to a local park filled with homeless kids. &amp;quot;These children had no food,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;so they sniffed glue to bear the cold nights. It moved me so much that at that very moment, I took up a mandate to succeed in life and give a hand to those kids.&amp;quot; A decade later, Shakira started her foundation, Pies Descalzos, which offers food and services to some 3,000 Colombian children, in addition to operating schools around the country.   Though Shakira has long favored songs about love, lost and found, she is not shy about using music to give voice to her political views. &amp;quot;How Do You Do?&amp;quot; the first track on Oral Fixation, was reportedly deemed too controversial for distribution in some Muslim nations due to the rather pointed questions Shakira puts to the Almighty\u2014 &amp;quot;Do you go to the mosque or the synagogue?&amp;quot; \u2014and her inclusion of bits of Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic liturgical phrases. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like to create controversy,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but I like to stimulate conversation. That&amp;#039;s the function of art, to press those buttons that rarely get pressed because we are enclosed in our little routines, sitting in our gray offices, in front of the same computers.&amp;quot;   Another song on the album, &amp;quot;Timor,&amp;quot; refers to the horrors that engulfed East Timor after it was invaded by Indonesia in 1975. &amp;quot;After hearing about that, I realized that pop culture is so distracting, sometimes we forget there are places in the world where human rights are being violated and people are asking for help.&amp;quot;   A big proponent of psychoanalysis, Shakira is currently seeing two therapists, a Freudian and a Kleinian, because &amp;quot;I like to get a second opinion,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s the greatest thing. I think every adult needs a therapist. Because you need to get to know the dark spots of your mind. We&amp;#039;re all neurotic on some level\u2014some of us more than others.&amp;quot;   I ask her what issues she&amp;#039;s been working on. &amp;quot;My analyst would fire me if I told you that!&amp;quot; she replies. But she acknowledges that therapy has helped her grow in her relationship with de la R\u00FAa, one of Latin America&amp;#039;s most eligible bachelors before the two of them first glimpsed each other across a crowded restaurant in Buenos Aires nearly six years ago. &amp;quot;I stared at him as bravely as I had ever stared at a guy before,&amp;quot; Shakira remembers. &amp;quot;And he stared right back all night.&amp;quot; They were formally introduced three months later and have been together ever since. I ask about the big diamond ring on her middle finger. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve had it for four years, but fortunately it didn&amp;#039;t come with an expiration date!&amp;quot; she jokes, noting that there just hasn&amp;#039;t been time to plan a wedding.   More pressing, after her world tour, which begins in the fall, she plans to take a sabbatical. She&amp;#039;s been dreaming about it for a decade: She wants to take a few history courses. Move to New York. Garden. Maybe start thinking about kids. &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;d like to become a serious sculptor,&amp;quot; she says, promising to invite me to her first exhibition, when she&amp;#039;s 40.   &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;d really give all this up to garden?&amp;quot; I ask as she offers a friendly hug goodbye. &amp;quot;Come on, you&amp;#039;re addicted.&amp;quot;   &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not addicted to this at all,&amp;quot; she fires back, nodding to her brother Tonino, who has been fidgeting nervously, waiting to take her to the next in an endless series of commitments. A beat goes by. &amp;quot;Actually, yeah, I am addicted,&amp;quot; Shakira concedes finally. &amp;quot;What am I saying?&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a9229/love-in-the-time-of-shakira-19446/>