Forbidden fruit

It’s a basic lesson from the Pop Star’s Manual: if you don’t want to court controversy, it’s probably best to avoid posing seminaked as a character from the Bible. For the Colombian singing star Shakira, however, her costume on the cover of her new album, Oral Fixation Vol 2, is entirely justifiable. Playing Eve as she grasps the decisive apple, she might be naked except for a few strategically placed leaves, but, refreshingly, her design concept has nothing to do with titillation. In Shakira’s world, it’s all about Freudian theory and Renaissance art.

“We all know that Eve was the first transgressor,” she explains in her lively English. “I felt it would be the perfect image for this album cover. I thought of Eve as another orally fixated person, the transgressor who would bite the forbidden fruit. She gave us the option of having an imperfect world — which is not too bad, I think.”

She might have colonised MTV in 2001 with her breakthrough single Whenever Wherever, becoming a staunch favourite of men’s magazines and Latin America’s hottest export, but Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll is an unusual kind of pop star, as comfortable discussing the economist Jeffrey Sachs as she is art history. Oral Fixation Vol 2 is Shakira’s second album in a year — the first, the Spanish-language Fijaci?n Oral Vol 1, depicted the singer as a Madonna-style mother about to breastfeed a baby. Or as Shakira puts it: “I thought that was the best way to explain what the album’s concept is about — the connection between mother and child, how the child discovers the world through its mouth. It’s a recurring theme from the Renaissance period.”

There is a line on her new album that speaks volumes about Shakira’s role in the pop firmament: “I’m not a virgin, but I’m not the whore you think.” Willing though she may be to exploit her belly dancing skills on stage, it’s clear that she refuses to play the sex symbol game.

“I have so much to say,” she explains. “Of course, when people who don’t know my records see me shaking my hips they probably think that’s all I do for a living, but people who actually listen to my songs know exactly who I am.”

No matter how Amazonian she seems in her videos, in the flesh the petite Shakira could be menaced by a tree-frog. Considering she’s been up since 4am to make a television appearance, and she’s already crossed the Atlantic twice in a week, Shakira is remarkably sprightly. Occupying the business centre in a soulless London hotel, she leaps to her feet to offer me a drink the second I get in the room, which is hard to imagine J-Lo doing. The fact is that there is no evidence of high-maintenance, Mariah Carey-style theatrics here. Make-up free, hair unkempt, she wears a ripped yellow T-shirt (recognisable from her performance on Top of the Pops earlier in the week), baggy black trousers and cardigan, and black trainers. Chipped pink nail varnish and a fidgety energy complete the impression that this is not so much an international pop diva but a teenage Goth girl keen to get back to her bedroom to listen to the Cure.

Yet Shakira is anything but childish. Her new album includes a song called How Do You Do, a plaintive dissection of the role of God in the modern world featuring lyrics in Hebrew and Arabic. No wonder she is in trouble — in the Middle East, her Edenic artwork has been altered to include more modesty-preserving leaves, and How Do You Do taken off the running order.

“I understand and respect every culture’s mentality and different idiosyncrasies,” she says carefully, sipping a glass of water. “I have travelled the world enough to understand that that’s the beauty of our cultures. But I didn’t count on being covered with leaves. Or that certain governments in certain countries would ban the song. It simply reflects the common denominators between us. It’s a song about peace.”

You might expect such earnest wristband politics from the only Latin American star to play at Live 8. Yet Shakira makes a great case for globalisation. “I think my generation has an awesome power — the power to provoke changes. We have the tools — the internet, technological advances. Music is very immediate.”

Shakira’s career proves her point. Slowly, she has pushed her music on to an international stage, signing her first record deal when she was 13, appearing in a Bogot?-based soap opera and ultimately teaming up with Gloria Estefan in 2001 when she was ready to leap from the Latin American market into the international one. Proving that her global consciousness stretches beyond sales, however, she also became Unicef’s youngest goodwill ambassador and runs her own charity for disadvantaged children in Colombia.

“We have to mobilise ourselves,” she exclaims. “There’s this mentality that artists should remain aside from politics, but I think that music has such an enormous role in people’s lives that it could be something besides entertainment. Maybe it’s because I was raised in Colombia and have witnessed so much social injustice, and now that I’ve travelled the world I’ve seen that this injustice exists everywhere.”

However, the eclectic Oral Fixation Vol 2 also scales down her focus from political to personal. She refers to writing songs about “the purest and most transparent love, which I’ve found” — a glancing reference to her six-year relationship with Antonio, the son of the former Argentine President Fernando de la Rua — yet you have to wonder how her fianc? would feel about songs such as Don’t Bother, a furious riposte to an ex and his tall new girlfriend (“She must think I’m a flea/ but I’m really a cat you see”). So should Antonio worry — is she the kind of girl likely to cut up designer suits if things turn bad?

“I let things go, definitely,” she laughs, “but I know there is a little monster inside me that wouldn’t want me to. That is the monster I try and exorcise when I write songs like this one. There’s a lot of fantasy in songs. They come from an intangible place where my fears are, where my dreams are — the same place where my nightmares live.”

Does she buy into the men are from Mars, women are from Venus theory? She twists in her chair. “Hmm. Women have many buttons that men don’t know how to operate — they always press the wrong one. We’re much more complicated than men.” She pauses and giggles. “That sounded very feminist. Believe me I’m not.”

Really? “I’m not a feminist, no,” she shrugs. “At least, I wouldn’t like to carry that sign around my neck. I feel very much in touch with the woman in me, but I think I have taken somehow a masculine approach in life — especially in the way I deal with my affairs. And when I say masculine I guess I say aggressive, you know, the way I approach my dreams, the way I chase them.”

She speaks of how she sometimes wishes for a sabbatical year: “I’ve been working since I was 18 (she has just turned 29) — I’d like to get away from it all on a temporary basis. I enjoy being a communicator, being able to express and share my ideas. I’ve always been outspoken. Music is my tool. I just want to take advantage of the time I have on the planet, however short.”