The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #230

#230: "Whenever, Wherever"/"Suerte" (2001) - Shakira

A confession: my wife made me put this song on my chart. Really. In a sense. Sort of.

The missus and I married ten years ago, and she taught Spanish at a nearby high school. In some of my earlier attempts at, uh, wooing, I--as many a musical man has done--attempted to make her a mixtape (actually a mixed CD, but I like the term mixtape so much better) of Spanish music, so I tried to include some traditional music and some contemporary, and in my research, I stumbled across Shakira, who'd hit it big in the Latin markets with her debut album Pies Descalzos a couple of years earlier. I also learned that later in the year (1998), she was releasing her new album, so I decided to wait till it hit.

So, as I waited, the missus and I married (ours was a short courtship--from close friends to engagement to married in the span of about seven months--and ours was not a shotgun wedding), and four months later Shakira dropped her second LP (still her best) ?Donde Estan Los Ladrones?, and the missus and I listened to it again and again (okay, so I was only who listened to it multiple times), and we knew this Columbian diva was a major talent.

Then 1999 happened: Prince's prophecy proved false, and Ricky Martin lived his crazy life all over America, and the missus and I said, "Hey, we know him!" And we did (well, not personally), and we knew that it wouldn't be too long before Shakira crossed over. One year later, she did, and we bought the album, and we loved the Spanish language tracks, for there Shakira sounded more confident, her voice expertly sauntering up-and-down the chromatic scale with ease, never lingering too long the way other melismatic singers like Mariah Carey and Celine Dion tend to.

Our favorite Spanish-language track was "Suerte." It's melody was darn-near inescapable--tied to the rhythm the way it was--and we appreciated the marriage of traditional Columbian instrumentation (the pan-flutes, the charango, etc...) with contemporary pop production (and Shakira produced this one herself), and we liked how Shakira maneuvered around the rhythm and melody much like Madge did during her heyday twenty years ago (and Shakira's a better singer anyway).

What threw us for a loop though was "Whenever, Wherever," the English version of "Suerte." The lyrics seemed clumsy now, and ridiculous at times (if you know this song, you know the line I'm talking about). Shakira's English phrasing was clumsy, too, and she had a difficult time singing some of those pesky English vowels, her voice pinching, making her nasal at times. Whoo, boy, we thought, she should have stuck with Espanol. We dismissed the song (the English version).

I came back to it, though; the more I've listened to it over the years (as "Suerte" never gets replayed at all), the more I've appreciated Shakira trying to not only sing in a language not her own, but also affect an accentless American accent. Teaching at a Native American high school, I've come to know the difficulty of trying to phrase phrases the way they're, uh, phrased in their native dialect. I appreciate Gloria Estafan's translation of Shakira's original Spanish lyrics to English, as for the most part she succeeds. Then, of courses, there's that line about her piquano pals: as ridiculous as it sounds, it's still...pretty ridiculous, but hey, it's sure memorable, notable enough to make "Whenever, Wherever" tied with "Suerte" as the only double-sided single on my chart.