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Shakira, Part II

Really, Shakira left her greatest number out of the Super Bowl performance.

When the kids' film "Zootopia" was released, we met a new character, a cheerful animal pop singer named "Gazelle." (The name was an obvious, cheeky reference to "Adele." OMG! I love "Zootopia.")

Gazelle--voiced by the inimitable Shakira--has one big number, and it's "Try Everything."

I messed up tonight!
I lost another fight! 
I still mess up, but I'll just start again.

 The writer was Sia, and she seemed to be alluding to her own haunting earlier hit, "Breathe Me." ("Help, I have done it again. I have been here many times before. Hurt myself again today.....")

"Try Everything"--a celebration of bravery and mistake-making (think of Lily Tomlin in MAGIC SCHOOLBUS, "Make mistakes!!!!")--succeeds for several reasons:

*It's still a little bit subversive to acknowledge that mistakes can be a good thing. (Three cheers for the chipper bridge: "I'll keep on making those new mistakes! I'll keep on making them every day....")
*There's a great twist on the standard bird metaphor. We're used to birds soaring. (Sia herself: "I'm gonna fly....like a bird in the sky....Watch my tears as they dry...") But, in "Try Everything," Sia makes a new and obvious point about birds: "They don't just fly. They fall down...and get up. Nobody learns without getting it wrong.")
*So many pop anthems are condescending because they have a pop goddess lazily and vaguely lecturing us. ("Baby, you're a firework!" "Pretty please, don't you ever feel less than perfect...") "Try Everything" doesn't stay in the second person; it's Shakira speaking as "I." And she has earned the right to talk about perseverance and risk-taking. Because--most emphatically--Shakira has persevered, and she has taken risks. There is earned authority here.

How could this song have been left out of the Super Bowl? Did we really need to make time for J-Lo's talk-sing rendition of the grating, self-aggrandizing (and patently false) "Jenny from Block"? Just an observation.....

P.S. "Try Everything" seems to borrow from Shakira's "Waka Waka," as well. "When you fall down, you get up....If you fall down, you get up....."
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