Songfacts®:

• This Latin pop and reggaeton song is a duet between Shakira and her fellow Colombian singer Maluma. The sultry tune is the first collaboration between the Latin superstars, although Maluma did record a remix of Shakira and Carlos Vives' single "La Bicicleta."
• It was Sony Music who proposed the idea for the collaboration following the "La Bicicleta" remix. "I was in Barcelona working with Shakira and it was an amazing experience," Maluma told Billboard magazine about working with the songstress. "She's a great artist and I learned a lot while working with her."
• The song is a battle of the sexes, where the singers croon back-and-forth about their relationship. Shakira has moved her hips to great effect in the past and here she is a temptress, seducing Maluma without making clear to the reggaeton prince where he stands with her. The song title is Spanish for "blackmail."
  
  "'Chantaje' is so smooth and sexy and modern and different and simple, minimalistic," Shakira told the New York Times. "I wanted to give it a different spin, where the girl is the mean one, because I'm tired of hearing songs where women complain about how mistreated they feel. This time, I wanted to take control. I wanted to represent the mean one in the relationship - the careless one, the free-spirited one."
• The pairing of the two blazing hot Colombian superstars proved totally combustible: The song topped the Spain and US Billboard Latin Songs charts, while also reaching the top ten in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico.
• The song's music video was filmed in Barcelona, Spain, with video director Jaume de Laiguana, Shakira's longtime collaborator. It earned 100 million views in just 19 days, becoming the fastest Spanish-language video ever to reach the milestone.
• This was the first single released from Shakira's 11th studio album, El Dorado. However, there was a time when the Colombian pop star didn't know if she would ever make another record. "I was full of doubts, and I thought I was never going to make good music again," she told The New York Times.
  
  Her inspiration returned, Shakira said, when she decided to concentrate on making one song at a time rather than a whole album: "It was like a liberation," she explained.
• The El Dorado record is named after the legendary "Lost City of Gold" supposedly located in the Andes that was sought by Spanish conquistadors.
  
  "For an artist finding inspiration is like finding a treasure," Shakira explained in a Beats 1 interview. "An album is a collection of findings, miraculous findings. Every song is a miracle when it comes through you. It's always so unpredictable. The whole process. How you going to come up with a song. Sometimes the lyrics come first. Sometimes the melody. Sometimes they come together. Like if someone magically mysteriously would have sent them to you or though you from some unknown dimension or parallel universe. I'm sounding a little esoteric, but the truth is that the inspiration it's really a mystery and finding it, it's very similar to how those conquistadors, those Spanish conquistadors felt when they found their desired gold, but to me there's no bigger wealth than of course having a family and feeling inspired."
• When it comes to predicting a hit, Shakira still believes her "hips don't lie": "Best case scenario, it’s my hips who predict if it will be a hit!," she told the Spanish magazine Viva. "But truth to be said, I usually focus on the dance, that's the benchmark I use to check if something will musically work or not."
• Shakira included this in her 2020 Super Bowl halftime show performance, which she shared with Jennifer Lopez.