If last year, video-wise, was all about Beyoncé’s rumptacular display on Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), any debate about the defining video of 2009 effectively ended with the return of Shakira. The song, of course, was She Wolf. If you haven’t seen the video, then most of what you need to know is summed up in the singer’s subsequent explanation of her actions on it. “When I was in the case,” she told Jonathan Ross, “I found myself taken by the moment.”

Thank God for the moment. Thank God for Shakira and her inspired decision to preview her new album with a song about a woman’s right “to defend her deepest desires with teeth and claws”. Perhaps most of all though, thank God for Shakira and her ability to levitate her bum from a horizontal position while keeping the rest of her body flat. That Shakira appeared to be stuck inside a giant urinary tract somehow underscored what her fellow Colombian Gabriel García Marquez referred to as her “innocent sensuality”.

In a world not short of female singers who foreground their sexuality while in the process obscuring their identity, Marquez’ s words were well chosen. If on Shakira’s third English- language album she defines the terms of her sexuality, she’s also defending her inalienable right to be, well, a bit silly. Anyone who remembers her 2002 breakthrough hit Whenever, Wherever will be aware that Shakira has a little previous in this respect. The woman who once sang, “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble/ So you don’t confuse them with mountains” is in ripe form here, not least on Gypsy: “I’m a gypsy/ Are you coming with me/ I might steal your clothes and wear them if they fit me.”

Shakira’s claims to have learnt English with the help of a rhyming dictionary are no less borne out by the fantastic Bedouin funk of Why Wait. Shakira impatiently shifts her gaze between the clock and the subject of her affections. “Why wait for later/ I’m not a waiter,” she exclaims.

Even allowing for the accidental second-language poetry which we have long since grown accustomed to hearing on our old Abba records, there’s a playful core at the centre of She Wolf that is no less discernible on the three bonus Spanish versions that append the CD. Perhaps because of her impoverished childhood, Shakira has the air of a woman who can’t keep a straight face, even when, on Mon Amour, cursing the former lover holidaying in Paris with his new girlfriend: “Hope the French fleas eat you both alive/ And your room smells/ And the toilet doesn’t flush.”

But just because, here and on a Wyclef Jean balcony scene duet called Spy, she remains poised on the brink of perpetual laughter, it shouldn’t detract from the meticulous attention to detail that distinguishes this as a superior pop album. In recent interviews Shakira has referenced Canadian electropop nihilists Crytal Castles and you can hear their influence all over She Wolf and Men in This Town. On the four songs recorded with Pharrell Williams, his streamlined future-funk creates welcome room for the insistent hot-tin-roof rhythms that made Hips Don’t Lie the most downloaded song to date. On the last of those songs, she declaims, “You know, a girl like me is difficult to find”. In a world where far more modest talents make far more immodest claims, who would dare to disagree?

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