15 June 2006
My stomach doesn’t lie: it sinks like a U-boat at the prospect of listening to these two dreadful individuals again. Still, I can muster some positives. The phrase “Shakira Shakira!” is the only good thing Wyclef Jean has ever done. Shakira herself has moved on from the plodding soft rock of her previous Irish chart-toppers. And that blaring trumpet may be a skin graft from another, more competent, record (‘Amores Como El Nuestra’, a 1992 track by Puerto Rican salsa singer Jerry Rivera) but at least it’s catchy and bright.
You have to admire how Shakira—a person with no immediately obvious singing, dancing, performing or songwriting talent—manifested herself as a global music star through sheer confidence and will to power. Likewise the lumpen Wyclef, peddling his pop-up Lonely Planet reggaeton to the undiscerning punterati. She mewls nasally like a goose doing an impression of a cat caught in a mangle, his charmless toasting is like a taxi driver calling a late-night radio talk show to moan about delivery cyclists in the bus lane, and a world of white-bread pop fans get to feel all exotic for buying it. And July 2006, with ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ at number one for the whole month, is when the official Irish singles sales figures begin to include downloads, meaning the message-board troll on the dial-up modem in your spare room now gets a say in the charts. Hip hip hooray.
