Shakira wasn’t about to let anyone tell her how to respond to her breakup with Gerard Piqué.
She and the Spanish footballer, 37, split in 2022 after 11 years together. It was an especially turbulent time in her life as her father also experienced a serious fall that year and nearly died.
“When it rains it pours,” she told Rolling Stone in a cover story published Thursday, June 13. “It was crazy, how many things I had to deal with at the same time.”
Shakira, now 47, found relief in her music. It meant expressing herself through harsh lyrics and graphic visuals in her videos — and she didn’t care what people thought.
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“I had this urge to express myself through my art, my visions, my music, transferring all that pain, all those sharp emotions to a space outside of myself,” she said.
Part of that came in what amounted to a diss track of Piqué — a duet with Bizarrap in his popular Music Sessions series.
“You don’t know the maximum relief I felt,” she said of “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53.”
In the song, she sings, “I’m worth two 22-year-olds / You traded in a Ferrari for a Twingo / You traded in a Rolex for a Casio.”
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She continues to let Piqué have it, suggesting “maybe work out your brain too” and “it’s clear that it’s not my fault if they criticize you.”
“And then I remember my manager at the time telling me, ‘Please change the lyrics,’” Shakira said of the track. “Of course, I was trying to calculate the possible contingencies and the risks, but I said, ‘I’m an artist. I am a woman. And I’m a wounded she-wolf. And no one should tell me how to lick my wounds.’”
She experienced similar pushback with the video for “Monotonía,” which depicts her getting shot in the chest then following her bleeding heart around a grocery store with her wound still open.
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“[They] raised their hands and rang the alarms and tried to stop me, like, ‘Think about it a little. No, why are you going to expose yourself like that? That’s way too gory,’” she recalled, insisting the visual was what she needed to say at the time. “They were tough images, yeah? But they were genuine. That’s how I felt.”
Though she was still struggling, Shakira said it was a time where she was able to see the support from her fans.
“We’re in a society that’s used to seeing women confront pain in a submissive way, and I think that’s changed,” she reflected.
Late last year, “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” won Song of the Year and Best Pop Song at the Latin Grammys. “Monotonía,” meanwhile, was certified platinum seven times.
