It might have been released in 2006, but it seems that Shakira and Wyclef Jean just couldn’t wait to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hips Don’t Lie.
To mark the upcoming milestone, the duo reunited to perform the song - which has become one of the best-selling singles of all time - on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and such was their energy that those two decades might as well not have happened.
After starting the song on her own with some hip-slapping/shaking choreography, Shakira quickly invited Jean - who, for some reason, was wearing a sauna hat - into her sandpit. And suddenly, we were back in the mid-noughties.
Hips Don’t Lie is actually a reworking of another track, Dance Like This, that Jean performed with Claudette Ortiz on the soundtrack for 2004’s Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (that’ll be the Dirty Dancing film that doesn’t have Patrick Swayze in it and you’ve never seen). One of the recording engineers on that song was Serge Tsai, and he was also part of the team that created Hips Don’t Lie.
"The initial idea was to do a remix with Shakira singing the part of Claudette, but when she came to the studio, she became so excited about the song that they decided to redo it,” Tsai told Sound on Sound in 2007. “She had a big influence on where she wanted the record to go. She was there from the beginning to the end, and it was fun, because she knows what she wants.”
Such was Shakira’s involvement that she gets a producer credit on Hips Don’t Lie, alongside Jean and his cousin and frequent collaborator, Jerry Duplessis.
"During recording they were really vibing," Tsai recalled. "We started with Shakira in Miami and we always have the same setup, with Jerry playing MPC3000 and bass guitar, and guitars and keyboards in the room.”
Tsai notes that it was Shakira’s idea to give Hips Don’t Lie a reggaeton feel, and points to the importance of the song’s low end. There’s some sub-bass in there that he thinks was created using either a Roland XP-80 or on the Akai MPC3000.
And then there’s the Auto-Tune on Shakira’s voice. When Hips Don’t Lie was released, some argued that this felt a little heavy-handed, but Tsai says that the opposite was true. “Most of the stuff that you hear is exactly how she sang it, without any tuning or other tricks,” is his recollection.
Whatever the production tricks used, the end result was undeniably hooky. Hips Don’t Lie was a number one hit in multiple territories, and has become embedded in popular culture.
Not that Tsai could have foreseen just how successful the song would become. "At some point during the making of Hips Don't Lie, I turned to my assistant and said 'Man, this sounds like it's going to be big,'” he told Sound on Sound. “But I didn't know it was going to be that big."
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