In a recent interview with ETimes, Nora Fatehi spoke about her latest work Dance Meri Rani, and also clarified that they didn’t try to copy Shakira’s look in the song, and also adding further that how heavily she inspired by her.
She said, “I love Shakira and I’m heavily inspired by her. I feel so grateful for her existence because she’s put belly dance on the map in pop culture at a time where nobody even knew what belly dancing was in Western entertainment. So I really respect that, her fierceness, her sassiness, everything about that. Having said that, I feel that being an African girl, I would’ve appreciated if people accepted and celebrated the African beauty standards which we were trying to portray in our music video by realising that what we were portraying is that there are a lot of African girls with curly hairs and Afros, Shakira’s not the only one.”
She added, “We weren’t trying to copy her because she’s not the only one with curly Afro hair, my mom has curly Afro hair, my sister and my best friend has it too, she has a blonde curly Afro hair and they’re African girls. I think our goal with the song is very simple, we have an Afrobeat song, we’re gonna do Afro dance and we’re gonna do an authentic Afro dance.” as quoted by Koi Moi.