SHAKIRA - Loba (Sony Music, 2009)

This post is not about Shakira and how much she sucks when she tries to sing in English or how much better she used to be back in the 90's, before she dyed her hair blond and crossed over to the gringo market. I wrote that a long time ago.
I don't really care about anything she does nowadays but I still have a lot of respect for what she has done in the past and I'm not ashamed to say that I love many of her early songs.
When I first heard the new single "Loba"/"She-Wolf" I almost died of an overdose of second-hand embarrassment. The whole promiscuous man-eater persona just doesn't fit her at all, the disco beat is just a desperate attempt to gain the attention of the gay crowd (something all Latina divas eventually do when they fall off the mainstream radar), the verses in that almost-rap flow are pretty good in Spanish but almost unintelligible in English, the chorus is absolutely annoying, horrible, the only good thing is her moaning that I'll love to sample.
Anyway I'm not here to talk about Shakira and her mediocre new song, but about the fact that the single was released in 7 inches vinyl! How is that significant? Well, for starters, I'm a vinyl lover and 7'' happens to be my very favorite format. I collect them. So yeah, as soon as I saw it I bought it, even knowing I didn't really like the song. Why? Because aside from some indie and punk bands (Los Abandoned, Boom Boom Kid) nobody in the Latin Music universe has published a 7'' single since like forever. In the Spanish music market it was widely considered a dead format for over two decades, particularly for the major labels and pop stars. When I picked up this record today at Ritmo Latino, I could tell from the faces of the women behind the counter that they had absolutely no idea of what it was, they have never sold a vinyl record in their whole careers working at that lame ass store.
The fact that somebody in Sony Music decided to release the new Shakira song in this particular format absolutely blows my mind and fills me with intrigue and expectations. Is this the beginning of a vinyl comeback? Are major labels going back to vinyl singles to compete with digital piracy or is this just a marketing scheme? I'd love to see a lot more Latin music artists putting out songs in vinyl and that's why I bought this, as an act of support to this market move, in hope that it will eventually lead into many other similar releases.
I read last week that Gustavo Cerati is going to release his new album in vinyl too, something that no other pop or rock artists in Argentina has done since 1991. I really wish he would release 1999's Bocanada in vinyl too. There are so many albums that I'd happily buy again just to have them in vinyl if only they existed! Like almost the complete catalog of Nacional Records. Who wouldn't like a Bomba Estéreo LP?