Aguilera, Christina

CHRISTINA AGUILERA

Born: Christina Maria Aguilera; Staten Island, New York, 18 December 1980

Genre: R&B, Pop, Latin, Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Christina Aguilera (1999)

Hit songs since 1990: "Genie in a Bottle," "What a Girl Wants"

After becoming one of the most popular teen pop singers of the late 1990s, Christina Aguilera sought to break out of the squeaky-clean image and sound that she had helped popularize along with the teen queen Britney Spears. With a strong, expressive voice that set her apart from other carefully packaged pop acts, the singer underwent a public image makeover that saw her reemerge as a streetwise, salacious sex bomb.

Born in New York to parents of Irish and Ecuadorian descent, Aguilera endured a peripatetic childhood because of her father's military career. When the family landed in Philadelphia, Aguilera began her performing career by appearing in local talent shows at age six. The minidiva graduated to a losing appearance on the televised talent show Star Search in 1988, later joining the cast of the Disney Channel's The New Mickey Mouse Club in 1992; the cast featured Spears as well as Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez, future members of the boy band *NSYNC.

In 1994 Aguilera moved to Japan, recording a duet, "All I Wanna Do," with Japanese pop star Keizo Nakanishi. She returned to the United States in 1998 to record the song "Reflection" for the Disney animated film Mulan. The song helped secure a recording contract with RCA, which issued Aguilera's self-titled debut in the summer of 1999.

Released seven months after Spears's debut, Christina Aguilera hewed closely to the pop formula employed by the singer's fellow Mickey Mouse Club alum: saccharine ballads mixed with catchy pop and slickly produced rhythm and blues songs. With a stable of some of the music industry's most able songwriters behind her, Aguilera was able to concentrate on her vocals, which climbed to Whitney Houston–like pop gospel heights on tracks such as "I Turn to You."

The album spawned the instantly hummable, number one hit "Genie in a Bottle," a slinky dance-pop confection on which the squeaky-clean, blonde-haired teenager sings the controversial lines, "If you want to be with me, baby there's a price to pay / I'm a genie in a bottle / You gotta rub me the right way." Despite its smash number one charting success, the song's burbling keyboards and generic electronic drumbeats did little to distinguish Aguilera from her peers. The album also spawned the hits "What a Girl Wants" and "Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You)." Aguilera took home a Grammy in 2000 for Best New Artist.

Hopping onto another trend of the moment, Aguilera released a Spanish-language album in September 2000. Though half-Ecuadorian, Aguilera did not speak Spanish, which required that she learn how to sing the album's songs phonetically. A combination of Spanish versions of her hits ("Genio Atrapado") and new tracks, the album was quickly followed by the Christmas offering, My Kind of Christmas. The holiday album mixes renditions of traditional Christmas tunes such as "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" with a handful of songs written by Aguilera.

A Controversial Career Makeover

An unsanctioned album of demos recorded by Aguilera when she was fourteen and fifteen, Just Be Free, was released to the singer's chagrin in June 2001. After a short period out of the spotlight, Aguilera emerged as part of a female supergroup to cover Patti Labelle's disco hit "Lady Marmalade" for the Moulin Rouge movie soundtrack. Dressed in lingerie, a large gold nose ring, and thick makeup, Aguilera took her place alongside singers Pink and Mya and rapper Lil' Kim in the video for the song, which became one of the biggest hits of 2001 and won a Grammy in 2002 for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. The new look was the beginning of a makeover for the singer, who seemed desperate to break out of her girl-next-door image and distance herself from other pop-divas-in-the-making such as Jessica Simpson and Mandy Moore.

Just three years after bursting onto the scene, a barely recognizable Aguilera emerged in 2002 with Stripped, a collection of intensely personal songs co-written and co-produced by the singer. Along with the album's cover, which features a topless Aguilera in low-slung pants with only her hair covering her breasts, the video for the album's first single, "Dirrty," made it clear that this was a new Aguilera. Joined by rapper Redman in the clip for the lascivious, high-energy R&B dance song, a barely clothed, heavily pierced and dreadlocked Aguilera—now preferring the name X-Tina—shimmies amid a panoply of gritty and bizarre characters, from masked female boxers and bodybuilders to mudwrestlers and fire-eaters.

Heavily influenced by rap and rock music, Stripped is full of defiant lyrics in which Aguilera derides her glossy pop image and strikes out at ex-lovers and an abusive father while painting a portrait of the complex, conflicted woman behind the hype. Showcasing her more mature, wider range, Aguilera shines on the album's sweeping ballads, including the smoky, jazzy "Walk Away," in which she sings "I was naïve, your love was like candy / Artificially sweet, I was deceived by the wrapping / Got caught in your web and I learned how to bleed / I was prey in our bed and devoured completely."

Though a critical and commercial backlash greeted the perhaps too-transgressive "Dirrty," Aguilera accomplished the rarest of feats for a teen pop act: a second act. Successfully breaking out of and remaking her manufactured image, Aguilera's powerful voice and emerging songwriting style showed promise for the former Mouseketeer's career prospects.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Christina Aguilera (RCA, 1999); Mi Reflejo (RCA, 2000); My Kind of Christmas (RCA, 2000); Stripped (RCA, 2002).

gil kaufman