Shakira’s New Song Is a Warning About What We’ve Become

Shakira released a song this week, and within hours, my daughter had it memorized. She’s ten. She knows every word of “Bzrp Music Session #53,” the track where Shakira dismantles her ex with the surgical precision of a woman who has clearly been reading his text messages. The song is catchy. The song is brutal. And the song is everywhere. Here’s what bothers me: we’re all celebrating it. The track has racked up hundreds of millions of views. It’s been streamed so many times that it briefly broke YouTube’s record for most-watched new Latin song in twenty-four hours. Late-night hosts are doing bits about it. Saturday Night Live parodied it. My dentist hummed it while drilling into my molar. Everyone agrees: Shakira is the queen. She’s empowered. She’s a genius. She’s giving us the catharsis we didn’t know we needed. But what are we actually teaching our children? Let me be clear: I don’t care about Shakira’s personal life. She can write about whatever she wants. If her ex was a jerk, she has every right to sing about it. But when a song that includes lyrics about trading a Ferrari for a Twingo and trading a Rolex for a Casio becomes a global anthem, we have to ask ourselves what kind of culture we’re building. We’re building one that rewards public humiliation. We’re building one where the most intimate wounds are packaged, auto-tuned, and sold to the highest bidder. We’re building one where my ten-year-old can sing about her parents’ neighbors’ divorce drama before she can properly tie her shoes. This isn’t new, of course. We’ve been airing our dirty laundry in public since the first caveman grunted about his partner’s bad cooking. But the scale is different now. The speed is different. The permanence is different. Within minutes of the song’s release, fans had already dissected every lyric, every reference, every potential dig. They’d created charts. They’d made memes. They’d turned a private pain into public property. And we call this empowerment. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’ve confused revenge with justice. We’ve confused volume with wisdom. We’ve confused going viral with going deep. Shakira is a talented artist. She doesn’t need my approval. But when the most celebrated cultural moment of the week is a woman publicly flaying her ex while the world cheers, we’re not celebrating strength. We’re celebrating the same thing we always celebrate: the spectacle of someone else’s pain. My daughter asked me what “Bzrp” means. I told her it was a producer’s name. She asked why Shakira was so angry. I told her sometimes people get hurt. She asked if she could play it again. I said no. That’s not a solution. That’s just a dad trying to hold a line in a world that keeps erasing it. I don’t know if I’m right. I just know that the song is everywhere, and my kid is watching, and I’m not sure we’re better off for it. We’ve always loved a good scandal. But we used to at least pretend it was wrong. Now we put it on the radio. We hand out awards. We teach our children the words. And then we wonder why they grow up thinking that love is a war and that the only way to win is to make the other person lose in public. Shakira can sing whatever she wants. But we don’t have to dance.