ARTIST: Shakira
TITLE: “Loba”
WEB DEBUT: June 29, 2009
ONE-LISTEN VERDICT: Shakira’s first single since her 2007 ringtone-ready Beyonce collab “Beautiful Liar” sounds at first like a straight-up disco jam, with an aggressively thumpy bass and string flourishes. But the way the singer’s normally husky vocals are tweaked on the chorus sound like she’s beamed in a backup singer from Planet J-Pop in order to complete her task of reinventing herself. The English-language version of the track–called “She Wolf–is set to debut sometime within the next 36 hours, and a few preliminary reports on that version hint at the reason behind the stylistic shift: the lyrics on the song’s chorus are about the wolf inside a woman needing to be let out. (So it’s a cloaking device?) The track is actually surprisingly hot, perhaps because of all these collisions, although I’m wondering if its straight-up disco revivalism will result in it being exiled from pop radio.
WHERE TO HEAR IT: Give it a spin on YouTube before it gets taken down:
Shakira - Loba **nueva cancion** [YouTube]
-
-
Editor:
Maura Johnston | E-mail
Idolator plays in WFNX's Sandbox every Thursday at 7:30 a.m. ET
F2K: The Worst Songs Of The '00s
Ooohh I like it, even though the voice thing is a little weird. However let’s not forget Shakira’s end all, be all of songs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e29LoYspe8
Maura: Does her voice sound a little Jewel-ish to you?
I like the song (it’s so far away from the bitter synthetics of the Peas that I don’t mind that it’s vacant), but the voice sounds strange on first listen.