Shakira

Born February 2, 1977, in Barranquilla, Colombia, Shakira was already a Latin American superstar before most of the English-speaking world had heard her name. Pies Descalzos (1995) reached number five on Billboard's Top Latin Albums chart, and 1998's Dónde Están los Ladrones? sold over seven million copies worldwide — a singer-songwriter with a rock streak, an unmistakable voice, and a belly-dance stage presence she'd been honing since childhood, when a doumbek drum at age four reportedly sent her dancing on a tabletop.

The crossover was the 2000s' most successful language leap. Laundry Service, her first English-language album, arrived November 13, 2001, peaked at number three on the Billboard 200, and sold around 13 million copies by 2011 — considered the best-selling album by a female Latin artist. Its lead single "Whenever, Wherever" hit number six on the Hot 100 and number one across Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, its video making the case that MTV had never seen anyone move like this.

The peak kept peaking. Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 (2005) sold over eight million copies worldwide, and in 2006 "Hips Don't Lie," her collaboration with Wyclef Jean, became her first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100 — topping charts in eighteen countries, setting the record as the most-played pop song in a single week in US radio history upon release, and amassing an estimated 13 million downloads by 2017, ranking it among the best-selling singles of all time. For anyone who owned a mid-2000s radio, the song was simply unavoidable.

She never really left — her career has kept finding new peaks in the decades since — but the 2001–2006 run is the era burned into millennial memory: the howling choruses, the rock-poet lyrics that survived translation, and a hip-shake that required its own camera angle.