It starts with a seduction. A slow tango of potent touches and averted eyes. He is demanding: pulling her close, making her feel, then—just as the music swells, just as she allows herself to cling to him—abandoning her, letting her drop to the floor. In the music video for “Objection (Tango)”, the third single in Shakira’s English-language debut, betrayal marks the beginning.
The singer follows her lover only to find a new woman, gaudy and plastic, in his arms. (Every twenty seconds you repeat her name.) We see the next moments as Shakira wishes them to be: animated, a high-saturation fantasy of righteous revenge in which the lover is thrown across the room and his new conquest is neutralized, her gravity-defying breasts deflated with a well-placed finger jab.
Reality is not as immediately satisfying. In live action the unrepentant couple casts Shakira aside, letting her shatter against a glass table and laughing at the smoke in her eyes and injured arms. (I’m falling apart in your hands again.)
Eventually, however, it is Shakira who triumphs by bringing some of her cartoon bravado into the real world. (I’m tired of this triangle.) Cheater and accomplice are bound on wheels like knife throwers’ assistants, on display as they spin faster and faster and careen to their deaths. (Got dizzy dancing tango.) The jilted musician looks on, dispassionately performing the rest of her song.
The ideal, we are told with cartoonish directness, would be a quick retaliation, one as efficient as it is brutal. But if the initial betrayal is prolonged, if indignities continue to be heaped upon a broken heart, then only perverse humiliations will do.
*
Six months after she announces that she is no longer with athlete and father of her children, Gerard Piqué, Shakira launches a 2023 single cryptically titled “BZRP Music Session #53”. The diss track is full of only barely-concealed references to both her ex and the much-younger woman with whom he cheated: it's clear that it’s Piqué's turn to be mortified.
Standing in a recording studio with little adornment beyond a bra and lipstick in matching hot pink, the singer makes the bass-heavy, id-fuelled proclamation that "a she-wolf like [her] isn’t for rookies." The only cinematographic trick in this video is Shakira once again slipping into her animated form, this time roughly pencilled in and too busy exacting a very real vengeance to be properly inked and coloured.
"I’m worth two 22-year-olds," the woman in her forties sings. "You traded a Ferrari for a Twingo / You traded a Rolex for a Casio." And while Piqué defiantly drives and wears the cheaper alternatives, Shakira's song is a global smash and she is crowned the internet’s “petty queen”.
When Shakira takes to her Barcelona mansion—the one directly next to Piqué’s mother’s home, his doing—paparazzi catch her blasting her new song on loop while displaying a life-size Halloween decoration of a witch on a balcony in full view of her neighbour. I cackle as the witch-in-law’s cotton hair and dragging robe waft like so much dirty laundry.
*
After “Objection”, 12 years pass before I pay attention to Shakira again. The singer’s “Hips Don’t Lie” and “Waka Waka” eras have done nothing for me, but once I catch sight of the sapphic dreamscape of “Can’t Remember to Forget You” it becomes perfectly, crushingly clear why the earlier song and its video held me captive for so long.
Her hips locking and sliding in an intoxicating push and pull of Latin and belly dance, moving from sinuous femininity to ripped-jeans impishness, in both “Objection” and “Can’t Remember”, Shakira is like water. I watch her lounge in bed and in lingerie with Rihanna, the pair’s perfect cheeks concave as they smoke cigars in all their femme4femme glory, and a decade-old desire sparks again.
That, then, is the shameful reason why the revenge of “Objection” is so thrilling, and why the public discarding of Piqué twenty years later gives me weeks of barely-guilty pleasure.
There is, in Shakira’s actions, a snarling satisfaction in knowing that she will not be the only one hurting. I find it so easy to revel in her rage, wanting more for her than these unworthy men: the ponytailed oil slick whose death I barely notice, the smirking jock who can so casually bring a mistress into his partner’s home.
Why should she not turn her attention to something more deserving of her time? In the wake of a disappointing lover so difficult to forget, why not console herself with the equal beauty of Rihanna? But habits are not quickly broken and a twelve-year-old’s crush not so easily satisfied.
The irony is that I have Piqué to thank for the queered artistic direction of “Can’t Remember”: the footballer’s macho jealousy precluded Shakira sharing intimate scenes with a male costar, leading her to choose Rihanna instead. At the time Shakira proudly announced her lover’s possessiveness and revelled in the fact that “he protects his turf.” The she-wolf allowing herself to be mere territory: how unsatisfying.
*
What I want doesn’t matter. The comfort found in Rihanna is only performance, and when betrayed, Shakira seems perfectly willing, in fiction and in life, to lash out equally at both parties. (Never mind that the women involved have made no monogamous pledge to her.) Perceived antagonists don’t end up co-conspirators.
How bittersweet, then, that I have not outgrown this wish. (It’s not her fault that she’s so irresistible.) Now in my thirties, I see how little I’ve evolved beyond the child who cheered on revenge. (I wish there was a chance for you and me.)
Best, perhaps, to wish Shakira well and disentangle myself from the mess of desire, pettiness, guilt, and disappointment she elicits. (You can try it, rehearse it, or train like a horse.) To turn, with renewed conviction, my attention to something less debased, a desire less futile. (But don’t you count on me.) To take to heart the strident Get Aways that close out “Objection.” (I’ve got to get away.)
But if Shakira, too, wanted to try something new, I wouldn’t object.
It starts with a seduction. A slow tango of potent touches and averted eyes. He is demanding: pulling her close, making her feel, then—just as the music swells, just as she allows herself to cling to him—abandoning her, letting her drop to the floor. In the music video for “Objection (Tango)”, the third single in Shakira’s English-language debut, betrayal marks the beginning.
The singer follows her lover only to find a new woman, gaudy and plastic, in his arms. (Every twenty seconds you repeat her name.) We see the next moments as Shakira wishes them to be: animated, a high-saturation fantasy of righteous revenge in which the lover is thrown across the room and his new conquest is neutralized, her gravity-defying breasts deflated with a well-placed finger jab.
Reality is not as immediately satisfying. In live action the unrepentant couple casts Shakira aside, letting her shatter against a glass table and laughing at the smoke in her eyes and injured arms. (I’m falling apart in your hands again.)
Eventually, however, it is Shakira who triumphs by bringing some of her cartoon bravado into the real world. (I’m tired of this triangle.) Cheater and accomplice are bound on wheels like knife throwers’ assistants, on display as they spin faster and faster and careen to their deaths. (Got dizzy dancing tango.) The jilted musician looks on, dispassionately performing the rest of her song.
The ideal, we are told with cartoonish directness, would be a quick retaliation, one as efficient as it is brutal. But if the initial betrayal is prolonged, if indignities continue to be heaped upon a broken heart, then only perverse humiliations will do.
*
Six months after she announces that she is no longer with athlete and father of her children, Gerard Piqué, Shakira launches a 2023 single cryptically titled “BZRP Music Session #53”. The diss track is full of only barely-concealed references to both her ex and the much-younger woman with whom he cheated: it's clear that it’s Piqué's turn to be mortified.
Standing in a recording studio with little adornment beyond a bra and lipstick in matching hot pink, the singer makes the bass-heavy, id-fuelled proclamation that "a she-wolf like [her] isn’t for rookies." The only cinematographic trick in this video is Shakira once again slipping into her animated form, this time roughly pencilled in and too busy exacting a very real vengeance to be properly inked and coloured.
"I’m worth two 22-year-olds," the woman in her forties sings. "You traded a Ferrari for a Twingo / You traded a Rolex for a Casio." And while Piqué defiantly drives and wears the cheaper alternatives, Shakira's song is a global smash and she is crowned the internet’s “petty queen”.
When Shakira takes to her Barcelona mansion—the one directly next to Piqué’s mother’s home, his doing—paparazzi catch her blasting her new song on loop while displaying a life-size Halloween decoration of a witch on a balcony in full view of her neighbour. I cackle as the witch-in-law’s cotton hair and dragging robe waft like so much dirty laundry.
*
After “Objection”, 12 years pass before I pay attention to Shakira again. The singer’s “Hips Don’t Lie” and “Waka Waka” eras have done nothing for me, but once I catch sight of the sapphic dreamscape of “Can’t Remember to Forget You” it becomes perfectly, crushingly clear why the earlier song and its video held me captive for so long.
Her hips locking and sliding in an intoxicating push and pull of Latin and belly dance, moving from sinuous femininity to ripped-jeans impishness, in both “Objection” and “Can’t Remember”, Shakira is like water. I watch her lounge in bed and in lingerie with Rihanna, the pair’s perfect cheeks concave as they smoke cigars in all their femme4femme glory, and a decade-old desire sparks again.
That, then, is the shameful reason why the revenge of “Objection” is so thrilling, and why the public discarding of Piqué twenty years later gives me weeks of barely-guilty pleasure.
There is, in Shakira’s actions, a snarling satisfaction in knowing that she will not be the only one hurting. I find it so easy to revel in her rage, wanting more for her than these unworthy men: the ponytailed oil slick whose death I barely notice, the smirking jock who can so casually bring a mistress into his partner’s home.
Why should she not turn her attention to something more deserving of her time? In the wake of a disappointing lover so difficult to forget, why not console herself with the equal beauty of Rihanna? But habits are not quickly broken and a twelve-year-old’s crush not so easily satisfied.
The irony is that I have Piqué to thank for the queered artistic direction of “Can’t Remember”: the footballer’s macho jealousy precluded Shakira sharing intimate scenes with a male costar, leading her to choose Rihanna instead. At the time Shakira proudly announced her lover’s possessiveness and revelled in the fact that “he protects his turf.” The she-wolf allowing herself to be mere territory: how unsatisfying.
*
What I want doesn’t matter. The comfort found in Rihanna is only performance, and when betrayed, Shakira seems perfectly willing, in fiction and in life, to lash out equally at both parties. (Never mind that the women involved have made no monogamous pledge to her.) Perceived antagonists don’t end up co-conspirators.
How bittersweet, then, that I have not outgrown this wish. (It’s not her fault that she’s so irresistible.) Now in my thirties, I see how little I’ve evolved beyond the child who cheered on revenge. (I wish there was a chance for you and me.)
Best, perhaps, to wish Shakira well and disentangle myself from the mess of desire, pettiness, guilt, and disappointment she elicits. (You can try it, rehearse it, or train like a horse.) To turn, with renewed conviction, my attention to something less debased, a desire less futile. (But don’t you count on me.) To take to heart the strident Get Aways that close out “Objection.” (I’ve got to get away.)
But if Shakira, too, wanted to try something new, I wouldn’t object.