“Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean

song info

    “Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean (official video) is a Latin pop song.

    On October 28,2012, Shakira announced on her Twitter feed: Wow, Hips Don’t Lie just became Shak’s fifth video to be #VEVOCertified with 100 million views! Wow, El vídeo de Hips Don’t Lie ya tiene 100 Millones de reproducciones! Ya es #VEVOCertified Muchas Gracias!

link to the static song information page for this song:
http://www.thissideofsanity.com/music/songs/hi/hipsdontlie.php

    Summary quotation from Wikipedia:

    “Hips Don’t Lie” is a song based in a salsa and cumbia performed by Colombian singer Shakira and Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean, released in 2006 as the second single from Shakira’s second English album Oral Fixation Vol. 2. The song is a reworked version of Jean’s 2004 song “Dance Like This” and takes some of its instrumentation from Jerry Rivera’s “Amores Como El Nuestro” and lyrics from Dominican composer Luis Dias’ “Carnaval (Baila en la Calle)”. In addition to co-producing the song, Shakira also wrote new material not present in Jean’s original version. A Spanish version of the track, entitled “Será, Será (Las Caderas No Mienten)”, was also released.

    “Hips Don’t Lie” became a global success, reaching the number one spot on the charts in at least 25 countries, including the United States, where it broke the record for the most radio plays in a single week. It was Shakira’s first number-one single in the US and the UK, as well as Jean’s first number-one single in the US and his third in the UK. It won a People’s Choice Award and an MTV Latin America Video Music Award, as well as an MTV Video Music Award for the music video’s choreography. The song became one of the best-selling singles worldwide of all-time, selling 10 million copies, and it also became the novena song with the most paid downloads in history.

Background

    “Hips Don’t Lie” was reportedly commissioned by Sony Music to revive sales of Shakira’s flagging album Oral Fixation Vol. 2, which had come out in late 2005 in time for the lucrative Christmas-buying season. Vol. 2 was Shakira’s second album of the year, directly following the Spanish-language Fijación Oral Vol. 1 by less than six months. (As part of a small trend in 2005, Shakira joined Sony label mates System of a Down in releasing two back-to-back albums of new material in a single calendar year.) Ironically, in the crucial U.S. market, Vol. 1 – for which Sony likely had lower expectations given the album’s late-spring release and non-English content – actually sold better than Vol. 2, Shakira’s first English-language album since her breakthrough Laundry Service four years earlier. Despite its release in a slower sales period of the year, Vol. 1 had bigger first-week sales than Vol. 2 (157,000 copies vs. 128,000), charted higher (#4 – a rare ranking for a Spanish album – vs. #5) and produced a genuine hit single in the #23 hit “La Tortura” with Alejandro Sanz, while Vol. 2’s leadoff single “Don’t Bother” stalled just outside the Top 40. Vol. 2 was too important a project for Epic, so around the start of 2006 they asked Wyclef Jean to remake his own song with Shakira and give the album a crucial radio hit – a tactic that proved a tremendous success: When Vol. 2 was re-released in March 2006 with “Hips Don’t Lie” (plus an alternate version of “La Tortura”), the album shot up 92 spots on the Billboard 200, representing a one-week sales increase of 643%. As of November 2007, the album has sold close to 2 million copies in the United States, more than half of them the re-release containing “Hips Don’t Lie.”

    “Hips Don’t Lie” debuted on the L.A.-based radio station KIIS-FM (on the Ryan Seacrest Morning Show) on February 14, 2006. Shakira and Wyclef Jean performed the song on the following TV shows: American Idol, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Live With Regis and Kelly, The Today Show, Total Request Live, and the 2007 Grammy Awards. The song can be heard in the EA Sports video game MVP 06 NCAA Baseball, the film soundtrack to Ice Age: The Meltdown, and on MySpace records and the soundtrack on 27 Dresses.

    The use of the opening trumpets caused a small controversy, when Jerry Rivera openly accused Shakira of plagiarizing the opening trumpets without his knowing, though saying he would not press charges on her. However, rights had been obtained from the copyright owner and Rivera’s name acknowledged in the album’s booklet.

    Less than two weeks after its debut on KIIS, Z100 added the track, and less than a week after it was added to the playlist, it was the most requested song on the station as it hit #1 on the “Interactive 9@9”. It stayed on top for about a month. In December 2006 it was announced that “Hips Don’t Lie” was the #1 song of the year, a first for both Shakira and Wyclef Jean.

    A Spanish version entitled “Será, Será (Las Caderas No Mienten)” was also released. Shakira also sang another version (produced by RedOne) called “Hips Don’t Lie/Bamboo” at the closing ceremony of the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Berlin, Germany.

Lyrics

    The lyrics “En Barranquilla se baila así” (“In Barranquilla we dance like this”) are a reference to the city of Barranquilla, Colombia, which is Shakira’s hometown. The skirts used in the video to dance this part resemble the cumbia skirts, which are typical Colombian folk dress.

    The lyrics “Baila en la calle de noche, baila en la calle de día” (“Dance in the street at night, dance in the street by day”) are a reference to “Carnaval (Baila en la Calle)”, a merengue song written by Dominican musician Luis “Terror” Díaz and the unofficial theme song of the Dominican Republic’s Carnival, but frequently used in Barranquilla too. (Dominican merengue star Fernando Villalona’s version is the song’s best known version, it was a hit in the early 1980s).

    In the video, the masks and costumes in the background are “marimondas”, which are mythological creatures represented in the Barranquilla Carnival.

Music video

    The music video was directed by British director Sophie Muller and filmed in Los Angeles, California, United States. The video begins with Shakira against a black background dancing while Wyclef and a couple other men are watching her. When Wyclef raps his first rap verse, it shows him following Shakira with pink curtains everywhere. It also shows them on the street along with different people. When the verse 2 begins, she is seen sitting in a chair while singing. It then cuts to an arena-like environment, where Shakira is dancing with other people. It ends with Shakira against the black background. The majority of the costumes and outfits featured in the video belong to the Carnaval de Barranquilla, some of which include the white dress Shakira dances in, and the colorful flags. Shakira was given dancing lessons for the performance of the song at the MTV Awards by the Indian choreographer Farah Khan.

    “Hips Don’t Lie” has proved successful on LAUNCHcast’s top-hundred most-watched videos of the week, where it has spent an impressive four months at number one. Yahoo! had fans submit videos of themselves dancing to the song, which were edited into a “fans only” version, which has also proved to be one of the most popular videos on LAUNCH. The video for “Hips Don’t Lie” ran in the #1 spot on iTunes (along with the single) for several weeks. It was the most-watched video of 2006, and has drawn 70 million on YouTube performances. The video won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Choreography on August 31, 2006 and the MTV Latin Award for Song Of The Year on October 19, 2006. The video also placed #2 on VH1’s “Top 40 Videos of 2006”.

—from Wikipedia (the Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License applies to Wikipedia’s block of text and possible accompanying picture, along with any alterations, transformations, and/or building upon Wikipedia’s original text that ThisSideofSanity.com applied to this block of text)

Proverb:

Easy does not always happen. —African Proverb