Twenty years ago this summer, a song built from a rejected Fugees reunion track and a soundtrack cut nobody remembered spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It remains the only chart-topper of Shakira’s entire career.

A Song That Almost Never Belonged to Shakira

Before Shakira sang a single note of it, the track underneath “Hips Don’t Lie” had already failed twice. Wyclef Jean originally built the song as a possible Fugees reunion track, but the reunion reportedly collapsed the same day after bandmate Lauryn Hill rejected the idea, according to Stereogum’s deep-dive history of the song. Jean then recorded it as “Dance Like This” featuring Claudette Ortiz of City High for the Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights soundtrack in 2004. That version came and went with barely a ripple.

The song didn’t even make Shakira’s original 2005 album Oral Fixation, Vol. 2. It surfaced only when the album was reissued months later, added almost as an afterthought rather than positioned as a lead single from the start, per the song’s documented release history. Shakira reworked Jean’s structure and samples with her own vocal phrasing and new lyrics, credited alongside Jean and producer Jerry Duplessis, and the label released it as a single on February 28, 2006.

From Late Addition to Radio Takeover

Once “Hips Don’t Lie” was out, it moved fast. It climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 17, 2006, and held the top spot for two consecutive weeks, according to Billboard’s chart history of the song. At radio, it became one of the most-played pop songs in a single week in U.S. history, generating more than 2 billion in cumulative radio airplay audience, and its release helped push the reissued Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 from No. 98 back up to No. 6 on the Billboard 200, according to AOL’s anniversary retrospective on the song. The single eventually sold more than 4.1 million digital downloads in the United States and reached quadruple-platinum certification. Worldwide, the song had been downloaded more than 13 million times by 2017, according to tracking data cited in the song’s release history, a tally unusual for a track that had been rejected once, shelved once, and only added to Shakira’s album on a reissue.

Wyclef Jean’s bilingual rap verse helped the song cross into Latin American, European, and U.S. markets simultaneously, an unusually broad reach for a single credited to a Colombian artist on the American charts at the time. It arrived at a moment when Shakira’s prior English-language lead single had stalled at No. 42, according to Billboard’s chart history, which makes the jump to No. 1 more dramatic given the song almost didn’t make the album at all.

Twenty Years Later, Still the Only One

What makes “Hips Don’t Lie” unusual isn’t just that it hit No. 1. It’s that two decades and a Super Bowl LIV halftime show later, it remains the only Hot 100 chart-topper of Shakira’s entire career, a distinction still noted in coverage of the song’s 20th anniversary. Shakira has landed major international hits and record-setting world tours since 2006, but nothing else in her U.S. catalog has matched that specific peak.

The song’s legacy extends beyond the chart line, too. The rapid hip shake choreographed for its music video became one of the most imitated dance gestures of the mid-2000s, turning the song into a fixture of quinceañeras, wedding receptions, and gym dance classes well outside the pop charts. That kind of staying power is rare for a single that almost didn’t get released at all. Songs passed between three artists and two abandoned projects rarely survive to become wedding-DJ staples two decades later, let alone keep circulating on streaming platforms that didn’t even exist when the song first came out.

Shakira and Wyclef Jean marked the anniversary with a reunion performance of the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in May 2025, running through it together for an audience that mostly knows it as a wedding-reception staple rather than a chart statistic, according to Billboard’s coverage of the performance.

A track that started as someone else’s discarded reunion song, then a soundtrack footnote, then a late album addition, ended up being the one U.S. chart peak neither artist’s career has quite repeated since.