Shakira at SoFi Stadium: 10 best moments

After a tour postponement, a canceled festival appearance and a show called off at the last minute, Shakira finally made it to Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium this week on a world tour behind 2024’s “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran.” The album, which examines Shakira’s breakup with the Spanish soccer player Gerard Piqué, was the latest in a decades-long series of hits for the 48-year-old pop star from Colombia; here she played to two capacity crowds peppered with folks wearing fuzzy wolf ears inspired by her old song “She Wolf.” My colleague Sergio Burstein covered Monday night’s concert en español, but I ventured to SoFi for Shakira’s second performance on Tuesday. Here are 10 highlights from the gig:

1. It’s been a big summer for the walk-out video. Like Morgan Wallen and Drake before her, Shakira made opening the show a production unto itself, with a camera following her from behind the scenes, pro-boxer-style, as she snaked through the audience in futuristic shades and a silver jumpsuit to take her place onstage.

2. Flanked by the members of a co-ed dance crew, Shakira moved through plenty of choreography Tuesday night, none more memorably than the very convincing robot she did during a mash-up of “Las de la Intuición” and “Estoy Aquí.”

3. OK, one equally memorable bit of movement: using the arms, legs and backs of several male dancers as a living stationary bike in “La Bicicleta.”

Shakira moves through the crowd.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

4. As singles from Shakira’s “Oral Fixation, Vol. 2” LP, “Don’t Bother” was easily overshadowed 20 years ago by the chart-topping juggernaut that was “Hips Don’t Lie.” At SoFi, though, I much preferred the former, which she sang while jabbing at a sparkly pink electric guitar and which sounded like Courtney Love fronting Josie and the Pussycats.

5. Shakira performed 2009’s “Men in This Town” for what appears to be the first time ever on Monday — the result of a fan campaign on social media that urged her to haul out the song about the sorry state of dating in L.A. (“I went to look / From the Skybar to the Standard / Nothing took,” goes one brutal lyric.) She did the song again Tuesday in a bedazzled Dodgers cap as a pair of video screens showed images of Matt Damon, whom she name-checks in the tune as one Angeleno not meant for her.

6. For a salsa-fied version of “Chantaje,” cameras followed Shakira back to her dressing room, where she sang — live or prerecorded, it was hard to tell — through a costume change and a bit of hair zhuzhing before she reemerged onstage. It’s a clever set piece, which might be why Lady Gaga has a similar one in the Mayhem Ball tour she brought to the Kia Forum last week.

7. Shakira’s strongest vocal probably came in “Última,” a stark piano ballad she’s said will be the last song she ever writes about Piqué. (The song is “a cyst,” she told the New York Times, that required removal from her body.) Here she sang it while standing in a glittering mermaid gown that seemed to make it impossible for her to move — some kind of metaphor for the gilded cage of a celebrity romance.

8. Fuzzy, jangly, lightly contemptuous: “Pies Descalzos, Sueños Blancos” is truly one of the great ’90s rock songs.

9. Before closing the show with “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” her Latin Grammy-winning 2023 collaboration with the Argentine producer Bizarrap, Shakira reached back to start her encore with “She Wolf,” which when you think about it is a pretty unlikely hit to have endured for a decade and a half: a creeping disco-rock thumper about lycanthropy — “Darling, it is no joke / This is lycanthropy,” she sings — that’s somehow become an anthem of self-empowerment. Indie sleaze lives.

10. Speaking of throwbacks, the Black Eyed Peas opened Tuesday’s concert with a tidy run through some of their fondly remembered late-’00s stadium-rave jams, including “I Gotta Feeling,” which Will.i.am introduced with a little speech about the band’s love of L.A.’s Latino community. Said the guy known for his indefatigably cheerful music: “F— ICE.”