What color Shakira’s hair really is
This past week, our team took some time out of our G-Lab project for Oruga Touching Dream and devoted the time help out amplificado.tv. Oruga Touching Dream’s creative director Augusto Caro created amplificado.tv in his spare time to create a platform for Colombian musicians outside the mainstream to showcase their work online. Unfortunately, amplificado.tv’s web site is only in Spanish. Our team spent some time translating and writing much of amplificado.tv’s web site content in English, which will hopefully expose the musicians showcased on amplificado.tv to the world outside of Colombia. As a result, I’ve recently spent a lot of time listening to Colombian music. Reggaeton is really popular here in Colombia.
We were talking about music with Oruga Touching Dream’s CFO Diego Diaz del Castillo Fernandez and inevitably, Shakira came up. Without a doubt, Colombia’s biggest cultural export is Shakira. I learned a three things about Shakira:
1) Before Shakira made the cross over from Colombia to the U.S., she acted in the telenovela El Oasis in 1996. Apparently, Shakira sang at an office holiday party and Diego’s mother, who was an executive at the TV station that broadcast El Oasis at the time, heard her sing and let Shakira sing the theme song for El Oasis, “Lo Mio.”
2) Shakira alienated a lot of her fans in Colombia. According to one theory, an interviewer asked her where she’s from, and instead of saying she’s Colombian, she said that she’s half Lebanese. Shakira was born in Barranquilla, Colombia to an American father of Lebanese descent and a Colombian mother with Italian.
3) Shakira is not a natural blond.
