Perhaps I’m overgeneralizing. To be more specific, what has always bothered me is her vocals on “Hips Don’t Lie“. They’re too loud for the rest of the song. She overpowers the trumpet, the drums, even Wyclef—with whom she’s supposedly dueting. Even when she’s soft (because her fantastically expressive singing does occasionally make use of a wide dynamic range), she’s still louder than other tracks at their peak. Each time I’d hear the song, it drove me closer to crazy.

I had always attributed it to human error. A difficult explanation, as I’m sure Shakira spends more paying people to keep her pants extra-shiny than I do on my entire music studio (I dabble). Clearly she’d have the best studio engineers that money could buy. I as at a dead end. Then I signed up for Zipcar.

Zipcar is only a minor player in the plot to unravel the Shakira Code, but getting me back in the driver’s seat (I haven’t owned a car for years) exposed me to something that had been missing in my life. Radio. I literally do not own a radio. All of my music comes from the internet. Once in a while I’ll go to Amoeba to see what other people are into, but radio had disappeared completely.

In a car, with no access to my beloved internet, I was adrift. Wait? What was that my friend Brant had said? Something about a channel that plays all Hyphy-Reggaeton mash-ups? Yes, “La Kalle“… what was the frequency? I desperately hit scan and trusted my rented Toyota Matrix to come through for me.

What I found was a version of “Hips Don’t Lie” that I had never heard before. It had trumpets, accordians, latin percussion, and Shakira’s vocals were correctly mixed! I realized, with a start, that I was probably hearing the original version and that the one I had been exposed to for so long was the White People Version.

It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. When an artist records a song, it’s normally embellished with a great manner of assorted accompaniment, only some of which make it to the “final mix”. I can recall how Amy Grant, when she first broke out of the Christian Country category and into Adult Contemporary with her songs “Baby, Baby” and (not her song) “Big Yellow Taxi“, had to remove all slide guitars from the mix. They were simply too country for non-country radio stations. She sent different versions to different stations and shot up the charts.

No doubt Shakira does something similar with her songs. Actually, it’s probably Shakira’s label that does it—I have a hard time seeing Shakira in the studio saying, “Can we turn down the accordian on this part, I don’t want people to think I’m Mexican!” That seems a little low.

Sarah, with whom I now live in the heart of San Francisco’s Spanish-speaking Mission District, has been a Shakira fan since back before she bleached her hair and started singing in English. We’ve often discussed the gentrification of ethnic music, though I have yet to engage her on my Chocolate Umbrella mash-up (which I consider the marriage of two songs deeply laden with troubling yet compelling messages about race). I was very happy that my sharp ear managed to contribute something in the on-going “Has Shakira sold out?” question, though I’m not sure which side it supports. It’s clear that the White People Version was just an after-thought (though wildly more popular) and some studio engineer couldn’t be bothered to pull the slider on her vocals down 2dB so it would sound right. Way to stick it to The Man, by driving him slowly crazy (see above).