Shakira

Is Shakira’s Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour jinxed?

That may seem like an odd question to ask about one of 2025’s most lucrative concert treks, which drew a total of nearly 400,000 fans — and grossed $46.6 million — for its seven-show March run at Mexico City’s Estadio GNP Seguros alone. A pair of earlier concerts in Lima and Buenos Aires each earned $13.2 million, and by the end of May, Shakira’s tour had brought in $130 million for its first 21 dates.

Shakira’s U.S. stadium tour concerts at Boston’s Fenway Park, Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium and — next Thursday — at San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium mark the first time a Latin female music artist has ever been booked to headline any of those three venues.

But the Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran tour has also had some major bumps for Shakira, the Colombian-born vocal superstar who is the best-selling female Latin recording artist in history.

Her Medellin homecoming concert was cancelled because of damages to the roof of the venue there. The first of Shakira’s two Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran (“Women Don’t Cry Anymore”) tour concerts in Lima was postponed after she was hospitalized because of abdominal pain. (The tour is named after her 12th album, which was released last year and is sung entirely in Spanish.)

Shakira’s Fenway Park show in Boston was canceled hours before its start time because of “structural issues” with the staging. Similar reasons were cited for the cancelation of her concerts in San Antonio, Houston and Santiago, Chile.

A week after Shakira’s May 15 concert at the 82,500-capacity MetLife stadium, the New Jersey Dept. of Health issued an alert that attendees at that show may have been exposed to measles.

More recently, Shakira’s June 20 tour date at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles has been moved to Aug. 4 in the wake of L.A. protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.

Shakira has not yet commented to U.S. media about the ICE raids. But in a June 12 BBC interview in England, the 29-year Miami resident said that being an immigrant in the U.S. “means living in constant fear, and it’s painful to see… Now, more than ever, we have to remain united. Now, more than ever, we have to raise our voices and make it very clear that a country can change its immigration policies, but the treatment of all people must always be humane.”

This followed her on-stage comments in February when she won Best Latin Pop Album honors for “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” at the 2025 Grammy Awards. “I want to dedicate this award to all my immigrant brothers and sisters in this country,” Shakira said in her Grammy acceptance speech. “You are loved. You are worth it, and I will always fight with you.”

Shakira’s concerts are usually free of political commentary. But with her San Diego show at Snapdragon taking place so close to the U.S. border with Mexico — where she is also set to perform Aug. 11 at Tijuana’s Estadio Caliente — it will be interesting to see if her show here is business as usual, or something more.

Until then, anyone doubting Shakira’s global reach need only look at her 2023 single with Argentinian producer Bizarrap, “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53.” The bouncy dance-pop song now has more than one billion streams on Spotify and the video for the song has more than one billion views on YouTube.

More notable, if not mildly alarming, is the dizzying impact that a single line in “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” had on international stock markets.

“You traded a Ferrari for a Twingo, you traded a Rolex for a Casio,” Shakira sang as a riposte to her unfaithful former boyfriend, retired Spanish soccer star Gerard Piqué. In a near instant, the stock share prices for both Renault and Casio dropped.

“Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” is, incidentally, the closing number at concerts on Shakira’s current tour. That the tour is in support of her musically uneven album new is incidental, since her career-spanning set list includes at least one song, “Antología,” from her 1995 album, “Pies Descalzos.”

With any luck, Shakira’s San Diego concert will feature a cameo by the San Bernardino corridos tumbados band Fuerza Regida, whose charged polka-ska rave up, “El Jefe,” is one of the standout tracks on Shakira’s “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” album.

8:30 p.m. June 26, Snapdragon Stadium, 2101 Stadium Way, Mission Valley. $1,830 (for VIP packages; all other tickets are sold out). ticketmaster.com

There are at least two-dozen very sound reasons that Elvis Costello & The Imposters’ recently launched “Radio Soul! The Early Songs of Elvis Costello” tour is enticing and then some.

His setlist is averaging 24 songs a night.

All of them are from the first 11 studio albums he made with his previous band, The Attractions, from 1977’s “My Aim Is True” to 1986’s “Blood & Chocolate.”

With the exception of Costello’s aptly named 1983 album, “Punch The Clock, ” and 1983’s equally perfunctory “Goodbye Cruel World,” it’s difficult to think of another rock artist who has had such a long run of nearly successive great albums in a 9-year period (or, at least, any other rock artist not named Bob Dylan or The Beatles).

And Costello is doing his best to mix things up on the road.

The second date of his tour, on June 13, featured a dozen songs he had not performed the night before. The third night featured six songs not performed at either of the two previous concerts, including “The Beat,” “Uncomplicated” and “The Deportees Club.”

Or, as Costello put it in a statement announcing the tour: “You can expect the unexpected and the faithful in equal measure. Don’t forget this show is ‘Performed by Elvis Costello & The Imposters,’ an ensemble which includes three people who first recorded this music and two more who bring something entirely new. They are nobody’s tribute band.”

That doesn’t mean, though, there have been no tributes. The recent performances by Costello and his band have included a few songs (or, at least, parts of songs) by other artists, including Van Morrison’s “Domino,” The Specials’ “Ghost Town” and the 1969 Elvis Presley hit, “Suspicious Minds”

The only question now is how well, or not, Costello’s voice will be holding up.

I can think of no other Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee whose singing over the past decade or so has been as consistently inconsistent — strong one moment, raspy and strained the next (sometimes during the same song) — in concert. Here’s hoping Costello’s voice will be as true as his aim at his San Diego concert.

7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Humphreys Concerts by the Bay, 2241 Shelter Island Drive, Shelter Island. $183.20. ticketmaster.com

It says a lot about the longevity of Gong that its current lineup — which has been together for nine years without a lineup change — does not include a single original member of this pioneering, very psychedelic French-English band.

Then again, Gong has had so many iterations since the release of its formation in 1967 that you need a calculator to tabulate them all.

Its many members over the years have included former Yes and King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford, guitar legend (and former Vista resident) Allan Holdsworth, singer keyboardist Gary “Dream Weaver” Wright and such jazz greats as trumpeter Don Cherry and bassist Barre Phillips. Between 1971 and ’72, no fewer than six different musicians held down the drum chair in Gong, one of them twice.

To make things more interesting, the band has used more than one name over the years, including Pierre Moerlin’s Gong and Gong Global Family, as well as such spinoff groups as Paragong, Classic Gong, Mother Gong, New York Gong, Acid Mother’s Gong and Gongmaison.

Gong was launched in 1966 by Australian native Daevid Allen, who had also co-founded the English band Soft Machine and had collaborated with both Terry Riley and William Burroughs. In the first half of the 1970s, the band’s members adopted such colorful stage names as Bert Camembert, Bloomdido Bad de Grasse and Hi T Moonweed. Shortly before his death in 2015, Allen asked the remaining band members to continue performing under the Gong moniker.

The titles of Gong’s albums over the years — most notably “Flying Teapot (Radio Gnome Invisible Vol. 2),” “Floating Anarchy,” “I Am Your Egg” and “Rejoice! I’m Dead!” — only hint at how heady this band’s music can get. Gong’s 50th anniversary was marked with a 13-CD box set, “Love From Planet Gong.”

The box set’s title alludes to the series of Gong albums in the early 1970s based on a science fiction-meets-hippie-esque mythos of a Planet Gong inhabited by — ahem! — Pothead Pixies, Octave Doctors and Flying Teapots, all tuned into the telepathic transmissions of something called Radio Gnome Invisible.

Unlikely Gong fans include Damon Albarn and the other members of the English Britpop band Blur. So far as I know, no edition of Gong has ever played in San Diego — although Allen did do a concert at UC San Diego in 1980 when he was leading the short-lived Divided Alien Clockwork Band.

7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Bornemann Theater at TERI Campus of Life, 555 Deer Springs Road, San Marcos. $25-$40. eventshumantix.com/gong