By: Brittney Corrado, Laila Schwin, and Alisha Bains
March 9, 2021
Shakira Ripoll is a Colombian singer and songwriter. She was born on February 2, 1977, and raised in Barranquilla, Colombia. She gained a passion for music and performing at a young age as she was influenced by her family and from multiple, cultural musical and dance styles. She was also influenced by her father, who often wrote stories. She used this as encouragement to write poetry and to get a typewriter in order to further her craft. Much of her poetry would later become an inspiration for her songwriting.
Shakira is known as the Queen of Latin Music, and despite a rough start to her musical career, she has achieved international success. She made her musical debut under Sony Music Colombia at the age of 13. Her first two albums, Magia (1991) and Peligro (1993), were failures in terms of commercial success, but these setbacks did not deter her drive.
In Hispanic countries, she started to gain popularity for her next two album releases, Pies Descalzos (1995) and Dónde Están los Ladrones? (1998). Shakira then began catering to a wider audience as she released her first English album, Laundry Service, in 2001. Laundry Service sold over 13 million copies worldwide and led Shakira toward a career of international success.
Who is the female, Latina artist with the most-sold albums? Answer: Shakira! She has also received numerous awards, including three Grammy Awards, twelve Latin Grammy Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, seven Billboard Music Awards, thirty-nine Billboard Latin Music Awards, six Guinness World Records, and she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In the early-to-late 2000s, she was named as the Top Female Latin Artist of the Decade by Billboard on two different occasions.
At 18-years-old, Shakira co-founded the Pies Descalzos (Barefoot) Foundation, which is currently providing education and nutrition to more than six thousand children in Columbia; this foundation is spreading to other countries, as well. She is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and has been since 2003. She was chosen to become ambassador because of her great involvement and passion towards global issues and her commitment to helping children.
Shakira has used a lot of her fame and money to help others. She also donated forty million dollars to Nicaragua for the Hurricane ETA Relief Fund.
Overall, Shakira has had an extremely successful, musical career and has used her fame and money from this career for extremely good purposes. She has defined a generation of music and diversity within musical styles in a way that most artists have not been able to do.
Just last year (2020), she performed the Super Bowl LIV halftime show with Jennifer Lopez, and if you watched it, you will know that her “Hips Don’t Lie”.
{Editor’s Note: Information for this article was retrieved from Biography.com.}
THE RETURN OF THE EYE 