Today’s theme is collabs! And what’s more collaborative in spirit than the FIFA World Cup…
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Claire Davidson: Shakira has contributed to several World Cup themes by now, and yet you’d be forgiven for not even recognizing her on “Dai Dai,” which contorts her natural elasticity into anonymous Auto-Tuned droning, and insults her further by placing her voice oddly low in the mix. More confusing is the song’s haphazard incorporation of afrobeats, whose more subdued rhythms are at odds with the industrial-grade banger the track is clearly itching to become, what with the thudding bass that emphatically punctuates the verses. The lyrics aspire to glory, but “Dai Dai” never fully culminates in that sort of climax, the loose guitar rollick that closes the chorus functioning as a kind of sonic shrug while Shakira and Burna Boy come off their halting highs.
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Julian Axelrod: In the amorphous genre signifier/brand partnership that is “World Cup Music,” this doesn’t reach the heights of “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” but easily surpasses the J Balvin/Amber Mark monstrosity “JUMP.” After years of being trotted out as the global feature artist du jour, Burna Boy sounds right at home next to Shakira — or maybe he was just always destined to do a World Cup song?
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Al Varela: These FIFA songs all sound so fake. So desperate to dominate and define the culture as if the games themselves don’t already do that. Do we really need to hear yet another attempt from Shakira to make “Waka Waka 2”, complete with ANOTHER Ed Sheeran cowrite that was probably sitting in his pile of rejects? Did Burna Boy need the check that badly? They can’t even bother to make these any good. Congrats on beating the tax fraud allegations, I guess. Might be time to start beating the artistic fraud allegations.
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Andrew Karpan: Workman-like, like a chant, “Dai Dai” makes sense even if it feels just slightly laborious to listen to; Shakira in smooved-out AI form. “Cristiano! Ronaldo!” she sings, with the spirit of a waiting room attendant working her last shift in hell. By the time she moves on to the names of countries (“Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia…”), the song has an almost abstract quality; words elevated and moving into the air, like a football. Pity that didn’t do very much for Ronaldo.
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Ian Mathers: I think they should continuously re-edit the lyrics and video so that as each country is eliminated their names and the names/images of the players from that country are removed.
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Iain Mew: There’s not too much to recommend IShowSpeed’s effort over this typically affable Shakira World Cup trifle. He didn’t cop out at just mentioning 14 countries, though. That’s less than 30% of the competitors! He did the full 48, as should be the case if you’re going to go down that road. I want to hear Shakira sing “Uzbekistan.”
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Taylor Alatorre: I guess we’re on the timeline where basically every World Cup theme from now until the end of time will sound like some variation of this. I say this so I can inevitably be proven wrong four years from now, when something truly wacky and paradigm-shifting, or at least as unabashedly peppy as “La Copa de la Vida,” will come along. For now, though, this still works. Bonus point for the roll call toward the end, which lightly punctures FIFA’s “we are one” charade by underlining that, no, there is actually a hierarchy here. You may be “at the top of your game” personally, but you’re still not getting your name next to Salah’s.
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Will Adams: At this point, Shakira’s World Cup songs have hit cruise control. We know how this goes: this is your moment, pick yourself up, be the best you can be, from all over the world, live your dream, here are the names of some countries. Burna Boy is a welcome presence, even if he’s limited to regurgitating those same sentiments.
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Nortey Dowuona: At least Burna Boy mentioned Iniesta. Truly one of the great bodymen of futbol. Oh, and the song is bad.
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Katherine St. Asaph: You’ve gotta have perspective here. The bar is set at “Andrea Bocelli, David Guetta, EJAE, Megan Thee Stallion.”
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