Dress-down Friday: How Shakira fused with the mainstream
Charlotte O'Sullivan
19 July 2002
Shooting Arabs is a vexed business in the United States. A Californian
friend of mine works in advertising and, a few months ago, was devising a
campaign for a prominent car company. She thought it might be interesting to
have a darkish-skinned man doing the driving just for a change but that
was vetoed by her bosses. So she went ahead and did the shoot with "this
real boring guy, so bland", only to discover that he was no good either. He
had dark hair, and the thinking was that he might be perceived by viewers as
Middle-Eastern. So she did the shoot again. This time, the guy behind the
wheel was blond. Blonde hair has magic qualities. Pop star Shakira seems to
be everywhere at the moment, promoting albums, selling Pepsi, singing her
latest single on Top of the Pops tonight. She's not exactly my type the
rubbery face, the vanilla fountain on top of her head, the lamentable jeans
but her singing is OK, especially that vibrato bit in "Whenever, Wherever"
where she sounds like an 8ft, beer-bellied and genial bouncer: "Oh, ho ho
ho, oh ho ho ho."
The point is that Shakira is marketed as the hottest of Colombian babes, but
as she points out in every interview she gives, only her mother is from
Colombia; her father is Lebanese. We're always talking about how so-and-so
looks a certain nationality. Shakira looks Latin, until you go closer. At
which point you begin to wonder; what's the difference between "Latin" and
"Middle-Eastern"?
Most people aren't 100 per cent anything, but we manage to divide them up as
if they were. Thus Halle Berry is seen as a black actress, even though her
mother is white. There are people who think everything that's despised and
looked down on should be celebrated, but to cheer on Berry as a black
actress is to accept the racist logic that one drop of black blood defines a
person's identity.
And then there's the other kind of racism, which tries to deny the presence
of "bad" blood altogether. Thus Paul Newman and Harrison Ford are never
defined by their ethnicity, even though both are half-Jewish. The Jewishness
would confuse our idea of them as mainstream, so it's just left out of the
equation. They can get away with it, people say, because they don't look
Jewish. But what does "Jewish" look like? The Jewish side isn't seen as
contributing to their handsomeness, it's seen as the blot on the landscape
that the stars have somehow miraculously escaped. Some stars, of course,
seem only too happy to go along with the blood-scrubbing. Salma Hayek
reacted furiously when a journalist noted the fact that her paternal
grandparents were Lebanese: "Don't call me Lebanese. I was born and raised
in Mexico and am Mexican!" Got that?
Shakira, faced with both kinds of madness, seems determined not to be
bullied either way. She was in Los Angeles during the 11 September attack
and suddenly found herself being asked all sort of questions, which
basically wanted her views, as an Arab. She said she was horrified by the
hate crimes that were being committed against "everything that's Arab, or
seems Arab", and insisted that she would never hide her Arab roots to gain
favour with Middle America. "I would have to rip out my heart or my insides
in order to be able to please them..." More recently, someone sent an e-mail
to key websites claiming that Shakira had said she'd rather talk to "pigs"
than Israelis on an MTV show, and that her music should, therefore, be
boycotted (it turned out that she'd said nothing of the sort). In interview
after interview, the only word Shakira has insisted on is "fusion".
To get to that fairy-tale hair, though. Shakira has complained that she
keeps being compared with Britney and Christina Aguilera, but that's what
her hair asks us to do. Shakira looks very different as a non-blonde; and
who knows if she'd have secured the Pepsi contract if she had stayed dark.
Shakira says she dyed her hair on a whim, but one doesn't quite believe her.
She learnt English in under two years; I reckon she wised up to the dos and
don'ts in American even quicker. The unwritten law says you can be part of
the American family as long as you allow them to decide if and when your
roots can show. And right now, America prefers blondes.
The summer's monster hit is just a kids' film in adult clothing
Sam Mendes's film Road to Perdition is being hailed as the only "adult"
movie of the summer, to which one can only blow a big, fat, childish
raspberry. While the whole thing looks as gorgeously sophisticated as Bonnie
and Clyde/The Godfathe/Chinatown, what it actually resembles is Monsters,
Inc. As in that film, our hero is a Sullivan (Tom Hanks), and as in that
film, he's a big, shambolic figure whose job requires him to scare the
bejesus out of people. Of course, this harsh exterior hides a heart of gold,
which we get to see thanks to the shenanigans of an over-curious child. Oh
yes, and then there's the benign patriarch who's sold his soul, and the
psychotic weasel sent to do all the dirty work. The body count may be
higher, but we know from the start that innocence, as guided by the hand of
experience, will win the day.
John Goodman was the voice of Sully (James P Sullivan, aka Kitty) in
Monsters, Inc. and had far more growly conviction than Hanks. The latter
does a lot of frowning but has all the menace of a milk-float. As for
Monsters' little tyke Boo she was kind of cute, too, whereas Michael Jr,
as played by the charisma-less Tyler Hoechlin ("chosen from among more than
2,000 young actors!"), has the sort of neck that is entirely wringeable.
Kids' movies are getting better and better by the day. Us grown-ups are the
ones being short-changed. Wah!
Mandy's made for Washington
Peter Mandelson is rumoured to be in the running to become our ambassador to
Washington, which would give me no end of pleasure. Today's politicians are
all so alike and groomed Mandelson, for all his smoothy-chops persona, has
the wild-eyed manner of Jeremy Thorpe or Enoch Powell: the stiff, jerky
limbs; the 1970s, David Warner smile; and, of course, that hair, which just
gets more and more mesmerising.
Around the time he was forced to resign over the Hinduja passports affair,
it really came into its own. One imagined him, seconds before greeting the
cameras, scalping the three nearest people to hand and then inexpertly
gluing the pelts to his head. When the wind blew, all three sets of hair
would fly in separate directions, desperately trying to find their way home.
Of course, politicians aren't just there to amuse me. And I had great
sympathy for the American woman whom I overheard anxiously discussing
Mandelson's future with an English neighbour. The neighbour was trying to
suggest that the appointment might not be such a bad thing, earning the
reply, "He's Mr Scandal-Boy, right. Now, tell me, why is that good?" "Er,"
from the other end, "he and Tony..." "He's got dirt on Tony, right?" "Well,
yeah, and I suppose he's quite devious, so..."
The light began to dawn. Peter Mandelson may have done things that he
regrets, but he's not going to a children's party, he's going to Washington.
Bush, Cheney they're not exactly scandal-free, so if he does get chosen,
he'll fit right in. As ever, only those glorious locks will set him apart.
Sneezy, dopey and grumpy
I once had a hard-line policy on hay- fever "sufferers". My summer and
especially my telly-watching during the summer was continually ruined by
my mother's explosions (sneezing is too gentle a word for what the
hay-fever-ee inflicts on the world). She would sneeze, I would scream, she
would scream, etc. Since then, I've known others and they, too, have driven
me berserk. They look for pity they do not find it. Why don't they take
drugs? You'd think those nice products at the chemist contained lithium for
all the fuss people make about wanting to avoid them. A little bit of quiet
is all I ask. Surely there's a way to do the whole thing less flamboyantly?
Now, having been struck down by hay fever as of this week, I discover there
isn't. Is it too late to send out a general apology? I now madden me. And I
can't even shout at myself to leave the room.
There is a time in the life of every problem when it is big enough to see,
yet small enough to solve. -Mike- Levitt-
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