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The Wall Street Journal 2-13-01
Cover Story
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.
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