As a song, “Don’t Wait Up” is fairly innocuous, and certainly doesn’t compare to Shakira’s previous single (with Black Eyed Peas), “Girl Like Me.” Yet perhaps there’s something worthwhile to be found in the video in that it emulates a certain “pithy” chanteuse’s beach and surf-loving aesthetic. That is to say, one Lana Del Rey. A person you wouldn’t usually associate in any way with Shakira.
And yet, “Don’t Wait Up”—with its surf-happy “narrative”—undeniably conjures images of LDR on her own surfbort in the video for 2019’s “Fuck It I Love You” (which is a double feature, as it were, with “The Greatest”). Directed by Warren Fu, who seems to have a thing this year for “borrowing visuals” based on his last video, Doja Cat and SZA’s “Kiss Me More,” no time is wasted in getting a shot of Shakira perched on her board. Filmed in Tenerife (where many a Brit likes to get involved in a timeshare rental scam), the backdrop competes with Del Rey’s own amid the shores of Long Beach and a sky that offers an green-hued aurora borealis (regardless of digital manipulation, it still lends a striking effect).
Shakira begins her “wave story” on calm waters as she builds up to the oft repeated chorus, “Don’t wait up/Don’t wait up, up, up, up, up.” And, just as Del Rey states in “Fuck It I Love You” with, “I like to see everything in neon,” so it seems to also be the case for Shakira with her neon (pink) light-up surfboard. The intermixing of scenes featuring Shakira dancing in a club setting echoes the crosscuts to Del Rey in the dive bar where she sings her “little number” (meant as an homage to the “Ride” video). The fact that “Fuck It I Love You” was released during the last year before corona would change everything is interesting to note considering the title evokes the sentiment of someone being at their lockdown era wit’s end with regard to keeping it strictly “lid on” and saying, literally, “Fuck it, I love you”—so I’m going to do something like touch, kiss or generally come too close to you despite the pandemic conditions.
“Don’t Wait Up,” as a post-corona track, has a similarly devil-may-care attitude that stems from being “forced” to keep one’s hair up for so long instead of letting it down, so to speak (a.k.a. being muzzled by a mask instead of being allowed the right to spread one’s boca air where they please). And why shouldn’t it? After all, there’s a reason the 1920s were so buck wild after the Spanish flu “ended.” Thus, Shakira’s anthemic declaration, “I need to do something for myself.” That something being to escape on the dance floor. And since the lover in question appears too preoccupied (“Why don’t you put down your phone and look me in the eye?”) to notice her in a manner that would make it worth staying in, Shakira is all too happy to say, “Fuck it, I love myself.” A popular post-pandemic feeling, as also recently evidenced by MARINA’s “I Love You But I Love Me More.”
And, of course, people felt that way even before Miss Rona. For instance, “Drink lime green/Stay up till dawn” is Del Rey herself essentially saying: “Don’t wait up.” What’s more, since many a couple was forced to remain cooped up in the same space for so long, it’s only natural that at least one-half of the permutation would want to get the fuck out (as Mariah would say) on their own. Even if only for a night among the potentially plague-ridden.
As for Del Rey admitting, “If I wasn’t so fucked up I think I’d fuck you all the time,” well, it rather speaks to Shakira copping to her own “fucked uppedness” preventing her from quantitative banging via: “Do you remember how we lit up the room?/And how you felt before you met all my different moods?”
While no one has the “patent” on surfing (except maybe Peruvians and Polynesians), it seems too coincidental that there are so many like-minded shots, including ones of Shakira with a fellow surfer that mimic Del Rey with her own occasional companion (separate from the scenes with Lana in her Gidget-inspired “60s alter ego” sharing a board with a muscly beefcake on a retro TV). Or maybe it is nothing beyond sheer happenstance that these women should share such a stylistic affinity. Then again, who knows, perhaps Shakira is an undercover Lana fan (you can’t spell Latina without Lana?)—either that, or the two are simply more like-minded than meets the ear and eye.
