Switched on Pop - The Shakira Conspiracy

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Shakira is back on the Billboard Hot 100 – thanks to the help of Argentinian producer Bizarrap. Together, their song “Shakira: BZRP Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” is layered with musical and lyrical references, from the callbacks to “She Wolf” to the multiple beat switches. It also works to play into something larger: something akin to a pop music conspiracy. On this episode of Switched On Pop, we take a closer look at Shakira’s latest, and how it’s indicative of a larger metatextual shift in pop music.  Songs Discussed: Shakira, Bizarrap – Shakira: BZRP Music Sessions, Vol. 53 Shakira – Vuelve Alanis Morrisette – Not The Doctor Shakira – Whenever, Wherever Shakira, Alejandro Sanz – La Tortura Shakira, Wyclef Jean – Hips Don’t Lie Shakira – She Wolf The Weeknd – Blinding Lights Giorgio Moroder – Palm Springs Drive LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem Pascal Letoublon – Friendships Beyoncé – Sorry Taylor Swift – All Too Well Olivia Rodrigo – Driver’s License Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm producer

Rianna Cruz. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So I've been thinking and I believe there is a grand musical conspiracy afoot in pop music. Ooh, accusations. It's about time for a good musical conspiracy. We've all heard of earworms, but the narrative is much bigger than a good hook, and it goes all the way beyond the music to affect our lives, the things we talk about, and the things we think about. And it all has to do with Shakira. Her new hit song is called Shakira Be Set Up Music Sessions, Volume 53. Great track, least catchy title on The Hot 100. The title reminds me almost of like a class. classical composition, like Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor movement one. It has that kind of

specificity. We'll cover the title and why it's called that later. This song is a bona fide hit, though, moving from grassroots listening to radio overplay. Here's the conspiracy, though. I think this song is not just a song. Oh, what? I think that. I think that there is an unspoken rule in pop music that Shakira and Bissarap buy into here, which is that to make a hit, a song needs to not exist as a mere piece of music, but rather a meta-textual cultural dialogue. A song cannot survive on its own these days. There needs to be a narrative with it. Hmm, a conspiratorial narrative, perhaps. Hmm. So what do you mean? Break it down. Well, we have seen it in songs that we've already covered extensively on the show,

like Flowers by Miley Cyrus, all too well by Taylor Swift, driver's license by Olivia Rodriguez, and so on and so on, where these artists are inflecting their songs with gossip-heavy context clues, often involving other celebrities and getting fans to pour over and decode these tracks both on and off social media. Shakira is leaning into this conspirator. formula on her latest song. But it's not just in the lyrics, it's also in B-Sadap's production. And to understand what's going on in the song at large between its musical references, its lyrical references, we have to go back and tell the story of the legend, the icon, the pioneer, Shakira. So Shakira, as she's monomously known, was born and raised in Colombia. She is one of

the biggest Latin crossover artists of our time. And I saw a tweet recently that says Shakira might be the biggest global pop star of all time. That might actually kind of be true. It all started when she was signed to Sony Music Colombia when she was 13. Wow. So started super young. She released two albums that she hated. And, you know, I don't know, they're not available anywhere.

Can't really stream them. So, like, you know. They didn't do that well. Right. It's like the dark Shakira history. Like, they're nowhere. The conspiracy deepens. Her career took off with her third record in 1995, PS Dels Caosos.

And it's pretty standard Latin pop music of the 90s. Here's her song Vuelbe. I'm getting Colombian Alanis-Morissette vibes. Me too. I've never noticed this timbrel association. Alanis is Canadian Shakira. There's a real vocal similarity between the two that I had never realized before. It all needed to be placed in the acoustic guitar, extremely upbeat, 90s vibe.

I'll be adored for what I merely represent to you. Well, it's the vibrato in their voices, right? Ha! quasi-operatic. Exactly. Tullo. Oh. Well, it's easy to see why this broke through because of that.

She's kind of doing like, I saw like a Chenate O'Connor, 10,000 maniacs type thing in sound, you know, that's all there. And that's pretty like standard, you know, 90s, pop, rock sort of musical vibe. Fast forward a few years to 2001, her record laundry service becomes her English language crossover album. And that's when she starts to blow up and go on her American hit parade over the next decade or so. Here's her track. whenever, wherever, off of laundry service. Wow. Okay. So in the first example, we have a Spanish language album using the language of American 90s alt rock. And then in the mid-2000s, we have an English language album with much more

Latin-specific influences, both in its rhythms and its instrumentation. I hear an Andean panpipe, for example. Right. And that blend of Latin and Spanish sounds with American sounds and culture becomes a key part of Shakira's career. And she continues this global meld and takeover of music by releasing her album Oral Fixation in two parts, Volume 1, which is all in Spanish, and Volume 2, which is in English. Off of Volume 1, we have Latotura with Alejandro Sands.

Wow, Shakira has the range. And of course, how could we forget off of oral fixation volume 2? Hips don't lie. Never forget. For a global superstar, Shakira has so much personality in her voice. Yes. I mean, she doesn't shave off any of her individuality or idiosyncrasy in order to appeal to a mass audience. She is so popular because she leans into the particularities of her voice.

and that is so cool to hear. So after oral fixation parts one and two, her next record is interesting because her sound sort of shifts to this Americanized version of pop highlighted by the title track of her 2009 record, She Wolf. Now I'm getting some, like,

Cranberry's vibes in her vocal performance. What did it for you? The Aoo! Also, was there a line about being used like the office coffee machine. Do I hear that correctly? I'm starting to feel just a little abuse like a coffee machine in an office. That hits close to home because we just got a fancy coffee machine in the faculty lounge where I work.

And it lasted for about five days before it broke. And there's a sign on it saying, replacement part is coming. It'll be here in two weeks. Did you howl in desperation? I did. I gave a Shakira-like yelp of Anwi and existential dread. Oh.

So most of the She-Wolf record in 2009 is distinctly pop, and She-Wolf becomes one of her most Americanized songs. After this, she continues her path on global domination and smartom, and with that, cements her global icon status. and the rest is kind of history. She's the highest-ranking female performer on Billboard's list of Latin artists of the decade in both the 2000s and the 2010s, and has been often referred to as the Queen of Latin music, which makes sense in the current musical landscape. When looking at the Spotify data for Shakira's top 10 cities by monthly listener counts,

all 10 spots are occupied by Spanish-speaking countries, and in all of these countries, she's second only, to Bad Bunny, often only being about 100 to 200,000 streams behind. So she is essentially the biggest female artist in Latin America. That's also significant given that so many of her hits are from prior decades and that she is a long career artist, whereas Bad Bunny is the talk of the town. Right, exactly. Shakira is 46, which is a crazy thing to know, considering she's been doing music since, you know, the 90s. Given the eagism that exists in pop music, that is notable.

Exactly, exactly. And she's sustained this popularity her entire career. She's credited with being one of the people to pave the way for Latin music in American markets all the way up to her co-headlining the Super Bowl halftime show with J-Lo in 2020. Such a good show. Oh, incredible.

I think that's like top three halftime shows. Her drumming interlude on that halftime show? Nuts. Wow. In that halftime show, while also being really cool, was super interesting booking because both J-Lo and Shakira hadn't had a top 10 hit in years. So between that show and the B-Sat-Up song, Shakira has expertly figured out ways to insert herself in the current 2020s landscape of pop music. In the past, she's explored many different styles throughout her career. but to get a top hit today, Shakira and other artists have adopted modes of conspiratorial songcraft.

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Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesday. on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. I claim Shakira be set out music sessions volume 53 as part of a global pop music

conspiracy. And it's because there's multiple layers to this song, not just in the musical production, but the lyrics and the ethos of Shakira herself. Let's look at the music first. Starts off with a spacey intro. When I first heard this,

I thought it could be like a weekend song. You know, it's like very 80s pop throwback, synthy. It doesn't scream Shakira right away. I always love a nice wordless vocal at the start of a track. That usually tells you that what's coming is going to be fire. It's very new. It's very current. And it places itself firmly in 2020s pop, right?

Like disco revival touchstones, there's a simple, dancey drumbeat and a deep synth baseline. It's current because it's retro. Yep. Exactly. It's evoking Georgiomo Roder, the father of disco, and the person who pioneered electronic dance music as we know it. It sounds similar to the beginning of a song like Palm Springs Drive. Oh, the musical references go deep. Sick.

Another musical reference that I think is cool, too, is that Shakira mentioned on Jimmy Fallon that the sound was explicitly inspired by Depeche Mode, which you can hear at about two minutes. into the track. I hear it. I hear it in the dark wave since. I hear it in the pounding beat. I think that's an apt comparison. I think it sounds like that TikTok footwork song, Friendships by Pescal Luta Blonde. So to me, it's like extremely retro and very current at the same time. Well, Depeche Mode just released a new album, so maybe that's appropriate. There you go. It's all fitting together, see? conspiracy. In this first part, we also have another musical callback in the use of the super saw. The super saw, like a singing saw where you bow a saw like you use in carpentry and produce a high plaintive tone. Is that what we're talking about? Not quite. Nate, no, the super saw is a

synthesizer sound created by the Roland company on their JP8,000 synthesizer that is like the sound. of trans music. Okay, I guess that sounds cool too. It also has come to embody, I think, a late 2000's early 2010's party pop sound. Think of a track like the aptly named Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO.

So the Super Saude, to be clear, is those radiant scents that are like da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah, exactly. It's the sound of a saw wave that every synthesizer have. it sounds like this. And then you just stack a ton of them on each other,

and they detune and create this epic chorus-like effect that you hear in the LMFAO. Wait, you're making a connection here between Shakira, Super Saas, LMFAO. I got to hear this in the Shakira. The lead sound, definitely. Yes. Can you whistle it for us? Depends what key is in. There we go.

That's it. That's the one. Beautiful. It's super catchy. It's super cool to listen to. It's working, I think, in this conspiratorial level of thinking, right? It's working to subconsciously evoke the era in which Shakir was ubiquitous in American culture, while also, at the same time, putting her into the context of modern sounds. This hit is different from all her others because of that. It contains multitude. And the smart production moves don't end there. The song employs a method used in a lot of successful hip-hop and Latin music. Bizarap switches up the beat several times. In the beginning, we have pop synths.

Right. That straight ahead disco beat. Then later in the track, we have reggaeton drums. Shakira wraps throughout the track, something invoking the song. Latin subgenre of Urbano. She carries like a hip-hop flow. It's something that's present in her other songs, this sort of cadence. There's a part in Hips Don't Lie where she kind of sings in this hip-hop-like flow.

Oh boy, I can see your body moving. I don't really know what I'm doing but I seem to have a plan. Super syncopated. Quite. This is like four songs at one. I've been kind of seeing that as a trend on the charts,

you know, over the past year between this and bad habit, these songs that are just a culmination of all of these separate sounds. The Beezer Rap session specifically is successful in these beat switches, I think, and they work to

A, keep the listener interested and B, in a small, martyr, more coy way, bring together these disparate sounds to access all audiences. We're getting the pop audience. We're getting the Latin audience. There's reggaeton in there. There's hip hop. It's a really genius way to bring everything together and make sure that everybody that listens to it can pull something that they like out of it. Because if you don't like the melody, you're going to like the production. If you don't like the production, you're going to like the regathon break. You know, there's so much in there. And it's so dense with that that it's kind of carefully constructed by Bissarap in the production to make it as all audience friendly as possible.

It's not just a song. It's a meta song. Okay, Rihanna, I'm feeling like I need to know who this mysterious figure Bissarap is creating this mad scientist composition. Like, who is this person? Right. That takes us back to the title. The unusual name of Shakirap is. Pesadap Music Sessions, Volume 53, like, as you said, the sort of classical type naming. B-Sadap is one of the biggest producers in Latin music right now. He's from Argentina and is only 24, but he's already received five Latin Grammy nominations,

including Best New Artist and Best Producer. He has a series of sessions with artists on YouTube, known per the title, as the BeSadap Music Sessions, short into BZRP. And over the past few years, his sessions have sort of transformed into this kind of status symbol. If you have a B-Sodab session, you know you've made it in Latin music. And I think Shakira, linking up with him, is super smart because he has a massive presence on YouTube. She's the 53rd. You know, there's 52 other sessions to look at.

But it plays into this thing that we mentioned before of like Shakira is in the middle of her career. She started in the 90s, you know? She is 46 years old, and as we said, pop music is very ageist. By her linking up with this YouTube producer, who's the current moment, and it opens her up to a younger audience. So let me get this straight. So Pizrap is making a song with all these different genres that can pull lots of different audiences in, but also has an existing audience of like a very cool scene, a younger audience that may be less Shakira adjacent. And so she launches this song into a pre-existing community to pull in new listeners and have an immediate built-in audience for this song.

She went grassroots rather than dropping something top down as the biggest star in the world. Right. It kind of plays into this whole meta-textual conspiracy, like we say, because B-Sed-Up is inherently online because that's the nature of his celebrity. By doing that, it already puts the song in an online context. And then the other layer is that people pour over these sessions. You know, they look at them, they analyze them, they use TikTok filters to put them in the B-Sodap studio. Okay, so you have an audience who are naturally digging through this material, trying to understand it, picking it apart. What are the other things that they're finding in the song? Well, Charlie, I'm glad you asked.

Let's go over here to the musical quirkboard. The clearest reference that we have here is the repeated invocation of the word loba, which translates in Spanish to wolf or more specifically female wolf or, aka, follow me now. She-wolf. Exactly. The melody is a she-wolf howling. Exactly. She's singing.

A she-wolf like me isn't for rookies. A she wolf like me isn't for guys like you. That is some text painting. I'm shook. The original she wolf, if you remember, has an iconic howl in the chorus as well. The bizarab session is a more successful howl now, I think. Bring back the howl and pop, you cowards. She's modernizing the howl.

Wow, this is why you need the entire history because it's embedded within the music. and most of the song references the music career, but also weaves in things from Shakira's life and her experiences and what she's going through. The song is essentially a scorched earth style takedown of her ex-football star Piquet, who she had two kids with. And it's a pretty harsh takedown.

There's lines emphasizing his new girl and direct references to Piquet and their life together through wordplay. The way that she sings in the song and her intonation emphasizes these not-so-settled connections, particularly in this line. That's like a little tongue click.

She's splitting up the word salpike into salpike, and the line translates to I only make music, sorry if it splashes you. Damn. It's so crazy. It's such a deep, multi-layered taked down of this man. And every line goes beyond being just the breakup anthem to be a direct comment on her failed relationship, her man's new girl.

She says clara Mente in the same way that she says Salpike, where she puts a space between Clara and Mente because his new girl's name is Clara. And what does Claremonte translate to? Cladamente is clearly. And the lines that reference her say she's got the name of a good person. Clearly, it's not how it sounds. But she's saying, clara, me. Oh, my God. Remind me to never cheat on Shakira.

Burning all bridges. Oh, absolutely. There's a line in there that I find super pointed to that's like, you traded a Rolex for a Cassio, which is crazy. That's a crazy thing to say. Wow. I mean, I feel like celebrity gossip is really not the role for Switched on Pop, but when you embed it so cleverly in your lyrics, that is another couple of attacks on that cork board. What a conspiracy for people to go and unpack. There's so many opportunities for realization of understanding that the song just keeps pulling you closer into its world, whether it's its many genres or it's a lot. It's a many genres, or it's a lot. musical callbacks of She-Wolf or even better, all of this hot gossip. Right. And putting this hot gossip in your music is sort of a conspiracy at large, this meta-textual approach to music. I feel like this whole thing, right, as we know it,

the sort of conflation of real life and music, it's always been there. But I think the modern moment really started with Beyonce's lemonade and the direct expression of emotion regarding her previously behind the scenes relationship drama with Jay-Z. Like the things that she says on a song like Sorry. But all of this doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's indicative of a larger moment, hence the conspiracy at large. To make a lasting contemporary hit in modern pop music, you need to write not just a song, but a cultural dialogue. And to stay relevant, you need to play into this

conspiracy narrative. Think of the songs that I mentioned at the top of the episode. Flowers by Mylie Cyrus. A lot of that dialogue is propelled by the fact that it interpolates when I was your man, which is a song that Liam Hemsworth allegedly dedicated to her at their wedding. Taylor Swift all too well talks about her relationship with Jake Jones. Hillenhall. Olivia Rodriguez embroiled in this Suprina Carpenter Joshua Bassett-like triangle. And you're probably with that blonde girl

who always made me that much. And even looking, you know, internationally, K-pop is a genre that is propelled by fandom, you know, and people analyzing these songs and looking at references to past eras and artists. Everything needs to be a conspiracy. in modern pop music or adapt to this kind of conspiratorial songwriting to make an impact. All right, we want to know what are your favorite musical conspiracy theories.

Have you gone down a rabbit hole that you cannot escape from? Are you a meshed in an artist? Do you need help getting out of a musical conspiracy theory? We probably can't help you with that one, but we wish you well. Larry Stylanson. Larry Stylinson. Go ahead, Charlie. Oh, my gosh.

If you do have one of these, let us know. We'd love to hear about it. We are at Switched On Pop on social media, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Let us know. Check out more episodes of Switched On Pop. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, our website, switchedonpop.com, where you will also find some conspiratorial merch for you to purchase and adoring yourself with. We're talking shirts.

We're talking mugs. Kind of spooky. It's getting a little bit too real. All right. All right. Switched on Pop is produced by Rianna Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarlin, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr. Our ad break music is by Zach Tenario of the band Ark Iris, who have a great new album coming out you should check out. And our executive producers are Hannah Rosen and Ashok Chorua, or members of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production

of Vulture. We'll be back on Tuesday when I'll be chatting with Caroline Polichek, who has the number one rated new LP on Metacritic, meaning all the critics together have agreed. This is the record of the year so far. It's going to be a really fun conversation. I hope you check it out. Until then, thanks for listening. Attention Spotify. Has given to the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addicive.

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