POPTIC NERVE 2: LANGUAGE, LEARNING, CULTURE & WHY SHAKIRA IS DEAD GOOD

Clearly The Grain is today honouring Shakira in all her convoluted glory and, having only just managed to tear my eyes away from the hedonistic visual treat that is the video for ‘She Wolf’ (see the post below for this sumptuous promo and a review of the album), I feel obligated to write a few words on learning, language, culture and what that has to do with Shakira being dead good.

A cursory glance at the Columbian singer would probably place her fairly snugly in the (North) American pop music category. Visual hit points covered: blonde, attractive, a penchant for provocative dancing and revealing attire. Vocal hit points: a voice that can flit from belting out high notes, to melismatic warbles, to soft-focus, heavy breathing, crooning[i]. Musical hit points: a palette of stock song types that range from up-tempo dance to slow, (either melancholic ‘love lost’ or sensuous ‘love consummated’) ballads. There is also a dalliance with rock guitar and, latterly, with synths and vocoders. Lyrical hit points: sexual, again, flitting between defiant independence and submissive desire – but, most importantly perhaps as previously noted, sung in English.

However, a closer inspection will reveal that these familiar hit points don’t quite sit so flush with Shakira’s oeuvre. Listening to any Shakira song leaves you with a feeling that something is not quite right. I don’t mean this in the sense that it sounds wrong – quite the opposite – it’s interesting and forces the listener to re-evaluate the clichés of pop music. I think this comes directly from her constant negotiation with a musical culture (American pop) which, to her, is not indigenous. To demonstrate what I mean, I’d like to talk a bit about learning a foreign language. Quite often when someone has learnt a language to a reasonable level of fluency, (and I’m talking here about vernacular language rather than academic language – i.e. learning through speaking, often immersed in a foreign culture as well as a foreign language) they tend to come up with jaw-droppingly brilliant terns-of-phrase that, whilst traditionally ‘incorrect’, shape the language in a new and exciting way that makes you reassess your own language conventions.

I’m sure the reader will be able to think of much better examples than I will put here (the events that I’m talking about are, by their very nature, transitory, ‘you-had-to-be-there’ sort of things) but as a brief example, a friend of mine, when talking about a piece of music he loves, claimed “it makes the hairs of your head stand up”. Wrong, in a traditional sense, but very, very right in a semantic sense and it makes you think why should the back of the neck be any more ‘correct’ a place to feel emotion than the head? Shakira’s music is packed full of these ‘wrong-but-right’ moments.

Now, before we go any further, I want to make sure that what I’m getting at here is not misconstrued as a colonialist, patronising “bless-the-funny-little-foreigner-for-having-a-go-at-our-language” discourse – that is far from my intention. In fact, as someone learning a foreign language, I am myself treading gingerly through the minefield of linguistic faux pas, encountering my own set of Spanish vernacular clichés and peculiarities (and creating a few ‘wrong-but-right-isms’ of my own). What I mean to say is that this is not just a uniquely ‘other’-to-English issue.

That little disclaimer out the way, back to Shakira! With this ‘wrong-but-right’ framework in mind, think about some of Shakira’s lyrics and you’ll see what I mean. The immediate example is “lucky that my breasts are small and humble, so you don’t confuse them with mountains”, although this is frankly just a weird statement in any language. The one that actually always gets me is “underneath your clothes”, and the lyrics (whose melody, incidentally, owes more than a debt of gratitude to ‘Eternal Flame’ by the Bangles) “but you own the place where all my thoughts go hiding, right under your clothes is where I find them”. In fact, this couplet is prefaced by the line ‘this might sound to you a bit odd’, which sounds a bit odd in itself (although this probably has more to do with the convenience of the rhyming couplet of “God/odd”). What this line does is take a cliché of pop music (i.e. ‘under one’s skin’) and reinterprets it, creating something that, at first sounds wrong, but then makes you think. The new version (under your clothes) is more immediate, more tactile, more accessible and, by its creation, makes the old (‘under your skin’) sound false, almost parasitic. It makes you ask ‘why would you want to get under someone’s skin when you can get under their clothes?’

The other linguistic trait Shakira uses is including words that frankly have no place in pop music! This is again a learnt-language trait, but one that is more specific to Latin-derived languages into English. Because of a linguistic history too mottled to go into here, English has a lot of ‘posh’ words that have similar, colloquial equivalents in the Romance languages. Again, there will be a number of examples with which the reader will be familiar, but to emphasise the point –in English we have the word ‘risible’ – hardly an everyday word (despite the plethora of risible things that happen every day), but in Spanish they have the very everyday word ‘risa’ – laugh. Think of some of Shakira’s word choices, ‘humble’, ‘retribution’, ‘incentives’ – and we come back to that use of ‘lycanthropy’ in She-wolf – hard to image Britney using words like these.[ii]

Finally, this negotiation with a ‘foreign’ culture in American pop, coupled with Shakira’s own mixed cultural heritage (Columbian, Italian and Lebanese apparently, if thought-substitute Wikipedia is to be believed – actually I’ve just read that Shakira is fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, which makes me like her even more) has led to an ability to an ability to appropriate sounds and styles from other cultures and bring them into the pop framework without sounding contrived or hokey. Alright – sometimes it does sound hokey – but that’s pop music. What I mean is, when Shakira uses Phrygian mode (to get technical – the Arabic sounding scale) or has someone playing a sitar, or chorango, or accordion, it just sits a little more naturally than it does with other pop singers.

This is just a top-of-the-head, spitball analysis of Shakira; it is, by no means, comprehensive. There are other examples of her ‘wrong-but-right-isms’. For example, that nasal, almost adenoidal voice (you know the one I mean) that she uses frequently which is juxtaposed so interestingly with the more traditional, breathy, female pop vocal. There is also her dancing. Now, I’m almost autistic when it comes to interpreting the semantics of dance, but there is something peculiarly angular, yet strangely appealing, about Shakira’s dance routines that puts it at odds with contemporary pop…

Maybe I’m way off the mark with this. I certainly haven’t taken into account the tendency of (good) female songwriters to have a disjointed, almost schizophrenic voice that reinterprets the known in a new, exciting way. In that sense, would it be heresy to suggest that Shakira shares many of the traits of the likes of Kate Bush, Bjork and Joanna Newsome? Would it be wrong to say that these stalwarts of great female song utilise this ‘wrong-but-right’ paradigm (I’m thinking here particularly of Bjork)? Does it transcend the barriers of language, culture and learning (and gender)? Is it an inherent trait of the creative artist? I don’t know – but I do know that Shakira looks amazing in that skin coloured leotard!

TA

[i] Crooning is probably the wrong word. For some reason I associate crooning with male singers, not female – Bing Crosby in particular. Is there a female equivalent of crooning? Is crooning a gender-specific thing?

[ii] I know this is probably a glib comment; someone needs to prove it wrong. ‘Posh words in pop songs’. ‘Rendezvous’ seems to pop its head up now and again – any others?