Shakira: how a very public breakup set a world record

Shakira

Photo: Andres.Arranz / CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 2, 1977 Barranquilla
Occupation	Singer
Awards	Billboard Latin Music Awards u00b7 Latin Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Album u00b7 Grammy Award for Best Latin Pop Album

When Shakira released her session with Argentine producer Bizarrap in January 2023, within 24 hours it had broken the Spotify record for the most-streamed song in a single day. The song was not primarily about music. It was a point-by-point accounting of a twelve-year relationship that had ended publicly and badly—a forensic settlement, in verse, with a Barcelona football player who had left her for someone younger. The interesting part was not the content. It was what happened to it: a moment of private grief, rendered in Spanish slang and trap beats, became a global cultural event in a way that none of her carefully engineered international crossover projects had managed.

She was born in Barranquilla, a port city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, on February 2, 1977, the only child of a Lebanese-American father and a mother of Catalan-Colombian descent. The family listened to Arabic music, and when she was four her father brought her to a Middle Eastern restaurant where she heard a doumbek for the first time; she climbed onto a table and started dancing. By eight she was writing songs. By eleven she was learning the guitar. By her early teens she had convinced a Sony executive at an audition in Bogotá that the voice—the particular thing, half Alanis Morissette and half Carlos Vives, that her school choir director had rejected as too dominant for the group—was worth signing.

Her first two albums, Magia (1991) and Peligro (1993), passed without much notice. What followed was more interesting: Shakira took a break, appeared in a Colombian telenovela, and came back in 1995 with Pies descalzos—“Bare Feet”—a raw, guitar-forward record that sold over three million copies across Latin America. She was 18. Three years later, ¿Dónde Están los Ladrones? confirmed that she was not a novelty. The album borrowed from rock, salsa, and cumbia in a way that critics argued simultaneously and charted fourteen number-one positions across Latin markets.

The move into English-language markets was careful and deliberate. Laundry Service (2001) was not a translation; it was a parallel construction, building on the belly-dancing image the Spanish records had established and reframing it for Anglo audiences who had never encountered Pies descalzos. The album sold thirteen million copies. “Whenever, Wherever” and “Underneath Your Clothes” gave her a second identity in markets that had barely noticed the first one. The formula extended through the mid-2000s: “La Tortura” featuring Alejandro Sanz spent 25 non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart; “Hips Don’t Lie” with Wyclef Jean reached number one in over fifty-five countries and became one of the best-selling singles of the decade.

Her connection to global football—a natural fit for the belly-dancing, stadium-scale performer from a country where sport and national identity are inseparable—solidified with “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa),” the official 2010 FIFA World Cup anthem in South Africa. The song became one of the best-selling World Cup anthems in the tournament’s history and marked a shift in how Shakira operated: less a recording artist in the traditional sense and more a force deployed at the intersection of music, sport, and spectacle. It also set up a relationship with FIFA that would prove decisive sixteen years later.

The years between Waka Waka and the Bizarrap session were productive but not electrified. El Dorado (2017) won her a third Grammy—Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album, 2018—and was her most personal Spanish-language record since the 1990s, but its reception felt more like a restoration than a continuation. Something in the formula—the careful calibration of language markets, the effort to inhabit two commercial identities simultaneously—had started to produce music that was precisely competent rather than unpredictable. Her biggest moments in this period were less about records and more about context: a years-long tax dispute with Spanish authorities, later settled; a relationship with FC Barcelona’s Gerard Piqué, begun during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, that produced two sons, Milan (born January 2013) and Sasha (born January 2015), and ended, publicly and without ambiguity, in June 2022.

When the split from Piqué became public, she moved to Miami and did what she had done with every crisis in her career: she made something from it. “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” dropped in January 2023 and documented the breakup with a specificity that was both uncomfortable and precisely right—referencing a Renault Twingo versus a Ferrari, a Casio versus a Rolex, and Clara (Piqué’s new partner’s name) in a way that left nothing to interpretation. The song shattered Spotify records and opened an entirely new phase: raw, freed from the crossover calculations that had shaped so much of her previous decade. Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran (“Women Don’t Cry Anymore”), the album that followed in March 2024, featured collaborators from Karol G to Cardi B and entered the conversation not as a comeback but as a new argument—that Shakira at 47 was more commercially vital than Shakira at 27 had been. The album won her a fourth Grammy, Best Latin Pop Album, in February 2025.

The Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour, which began in February 2025, broke the Guinness World Record for the highest-grossing Latin tour of all time within its first 86 concerts, earning over 21 million. In June 2026, she headlined the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup in Mexico City, performing “Dai Dai”—a song she co-wrote in five languages with Burna Boy, Ed Sheeran, Jon Bellion, and Benny Adam—before a global audience running into the hundreds of millions. In September and October 2026 she performs eleven residency nights in Madrid, a city that once pursued her through its courts and that she now arrives in on her own terms.

What Shakira’s second act argues is something the music industry has difficulty categorizing: that the specificity of damage—not the universalized, radio-ready version of heartbreak but the particular, named, locatable kind—is what travels furthest. The Bizarrap session worked because it was so precise it became universal. The tour works because the transformation it represents is legible across every language she has ever worked in. She continues.

Tags: singers, musicians, Shakira, Burna Boy, latin pop, Bizarrap

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