OriginalSin
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GQ June 2006: Christina Aguilera
- Thread starter cutiecutediana
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celebaholic
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Actually, she has said she wasn't trying to be Marilyn in this shoot - it was more Jean Harlow she was aiming for.
brokenenglish
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^ why can't she just be Christina Aguilera??
It's hard for me to like an artist who is trying so desperately to be another artist/person.
It's hard for me to like an artist who is trying so desperately to be another artist/person.
Mr. Fabulous
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I have the full GQ Article if anyone wants to read it?
Mr. Fabulous
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Ok.. it's very long. haha.
Mr. Fabulous
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At Prince’s party, all Earth-based reality is negotiable. Everything gets suffused with an erotic glow. Women look hotter, genders get fluid, animals strike curious poses—it’s crazy. Look: There’s Salma Hayek in a black dress, bending forward on a sofa for some heart-stopping décolletage. There’s Marilyn Manson, escorting fedora-topped burlesque queen Dita Von Teese. There’s Paris Hilton canoodling with Stavros Niarchos. Heath Ledger canoodling with Michelle Williams. Cameron Diaz canoodling with Justin Timberlake. It’s like an A-list Eyes Wide Shut here in the dark, VIP-only nightclub Teddy’s in L.A.’s lavish Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. And there, moving smoothly behind the crowd-parting prow of an all-business bodyguard, is a petite, platinum-blond synthesis of the whole retro-futurist, glam-louche, New-Old-Hollywood spectacle: Christina Aguilera.
In recent years, Aguilera’s look has been changeable to near unrecognizability: from blond to raven-haired to redheaded, coquettish to sl*tty to whatever it is you are when you’re in a soul-kissing-Madonna sandwich with Britney Spears. But however you described her, words like elegant and classic probably went unmolested. Not tonight. Though she’s club-casual in white V-neck cashmere hoodie, dark jeans, and leopard-print high heels, Aguilera’s spit-curl coif, bright red Kewpie doll lips, and sparkling ruby barrette suggest an R&B Jean Harlow. This is Aguilera 3.0: a Jazz Age Broadway-baby songbird. And from the looks of things—let’s see if I get this right—girlfriend is working it. “I really try to live out whatever I’m doing with the music in my life,” says the formidably self-assured 25-year-old. “Like now, even when I’m only going to be in the studio, I never go without bright red lipstick.”
Aguilera’s new album, Back to Basics, due to drop in a couple of months, blends a vintage-soul sound with state-of-the-art beatsmanship to form a throwback/hip-hop showcase for her outsize voice. Interweaving a Weimar-cabaret theme, it is decidedly a concept album. “In the end, it’s really cool to just follow a set vision,” she says. “I think it makes for a better product.” And the vision is a bold one, if not in ways previously associated with the buttless-chaps-clad provocateur.
To promote the album, Aguilera is planning a tour of jazz clubs, including the blue-chip Blue Note, a New York institution. Hearing this news, some may imagine the ghost of Ella Fitzgerald scatting foul oaths in the wind, but it’s also kind of awesome. Imagine for one second Aguilera’s former rival Britney Spears attempting something like this—the idea is insane, a joke. But with the nuclear-voiced Aguilera, who got nasty in public with much grimier originality than Spears’s Hefnerian pigtails-and-letter-sweater cliché, it’s nearly credible. After all, Aguilera has offended much stronger sensibilities than jazz snobbery in her career.
Whatever ruckus she’s raised, it certainly gets her respect here at Teddy’s, where a famous visage or an ultraviolet wrist stamp is all that prevents sudden ejection onto dusty Hollywood Boulevard. A cocktail-table nook is discreetly emptied of patrons as we coast up through the parting throng and alight there, Aguilera sitting down beside her new husband, Jordan Bratman. She looks content and certainly sounds it. “I’m in the happiest place that I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Aguilera had told me. “I’m very peaceful. I don’t feel kind of agitated or upset about everything.”
Although the two are clearly pop royalty, there’s a real knockabout vibe to the young couple, laughingly nudging each other and sipping Cristal, and this has a lot to do with Bratman. A nice little Jewish guy from New York, the 28-year-old music-marketing exec doesn’t immediately strike one as the sort to land a sexpot alpha female. He ambles unassumingly through the modelizing throng, a serene smile on his roundish, stubbly face. In a room where many men wear a thousand bucks in hair products alone, he’s rocking a red Yankees baseball cap and camouflage pants.
But he’s clearly a cuddle magnet for Aguilera, who prior to this has always seemed so alone out there, such a ferocious band of one. Now she’s on a conga line of two, following behind Bratman, hands on his shoulders, butt wiggling to the house music as they leave the nook for the balcony. Flanked by security hulks as champagne flutes periodically manifest from the ether, they are joined by a few pals, including Justin Timberlake and another guy Aguilera refers to as “an old Mouseketeer friend.” Before long, His Purple Badness takes the stage.
In a shimmering orange sport jacket and turquoise guitar, Prince shares vocals with a belting, Afroed soul sister and two preposterously hot backup singers in go-go skirts with Ikettes moves. Aguilera has met The Artist before, and at five-two could even look him in the eye (“He actually seemed smaller than me,” she says). When a deeply intoxicated white guy is pulled from the crowd and forced to…dance, sort of, Aguilera and Timberlake crack up, bending over the railing. “Man, that’s a cool step,” Prince says as the guy exits. “I’m stealin’ that.”
And when I look over at the petite singer beside me taking in the petite singer onstage, I realize something. Maybe it’s the distorting proximity to stardom, maybe it’s the neuron-addling Cristal, but for a moment the idea seems perfectly plausible. A giant talent in a tiny body. A flair for the brash and theatrical. A flagrant lewdness that’s part of the art.
Is Christina Aguilera the female Prince?
In recent years, Aguilera’s look has been changeable to near unrecognizability: from blond to raven-haired to redheaded, coquettish to sl*tty to whatever it is you are when you’re in a soul-kissing-Madonna sandwich with Britney Spears. But however you described her, words like elegant and classic probably went unmolested. Not tonight. Though she’s club-casual in white V-neck cashmere hoodie, dark jeans, and leopard-print high heels, Aguilera’s spit-curl coif, bright red Kewpie doll lips, and sparkling ruby barrette suggest an R&B Jean Harlow. This is Aguilera 3.0: a Jazz Age Broadway-baby songbird. And from the looks of things—let’s see if I get this right—girlfriend is working it. “I really try to live out whatever I’m doing with the music in my life,” says the formidably self-assured 25-year-old. “Like now, even when I’m only going to be in the studio, I never go without bright red lipstick.”
Aguilera’s new album, Back to Basics, due to drop in a couple of months, blends a vintage-soul sound with state-of-the-art beatsmanship to form a throwback/hip-hop showcase for her outsize voice. Interweaving a Weimar-cabaret theme, it is decidedly a concept album. “In the end, it’s really cool to just follow a set vision,” she says. “I think it makes for a better product.” And the vision is a bold one, if not in ways previously associated with the buttless-chaps-clad provocateur.
To promote the album, Aguilera is planning a tour of jazz clubs, including the blue-chip Blue Note, a New York institution. Hearing this news, some may imagine the ghost of Ella Fitzgerald scatting foul oaths in the wind, but it’s also kind of awesome. Imagine for one second Aguilera’s former rival Britney Spears attempting something like this—the idea is insane, a joke. But with the nuclear-voiced Aguilera, who got nasty in public with much grimier originality than Spears’s Hefnerian pigtails-and-letter-sweater cliché, it’s nearly credible. After all, Aguilera has offended much stronger sensibilities than jazz snobbery in her career.
Whatever ruckus she’s raised, it certainly gets her respect here at Teddy’s, where a famous visage or an ultraviolet wrist stamp is all that prevents sudden ejection onto dusty Hollywood Boulevard. A cocktail-table nook is discreetly emptied of patrons as we coast up through the parting throng and alight there, Aguilera sitting down beside her new husband, Jordan Bratman. She looks content and certainly sounds it. “I’m in the happiest place that I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Aguilera had told me. “I’m very peaceful. I don’t feel kind of agitated or upset about everything.”
Although the two are clearly pop royalty, there’s a real knockabout vibe to the young couple, laughingly nudging each other and sipping Cristal, and this has a lot to do with Bratman. A nice little Jewish guy from New York, the 28-year-old music-marketing exec doesn’t immediately strike one as the sort to land a sexpot alpha female. He ambles unassumingly through the modelizing throng, a serene smile on his roundish, stubbly face. In a room where many men wear a thousand bucks in hair products alone, he’s rocking a red Yankees baseball cap and camouflage pants.
But he’s clearly a cuddle magnet for Aguilera, who prior to this has always seemed so alone out there, such a ferocious band of one. Now she’s on a conga line of two, following behind Bratman, hands on his shoulders, butt wiggling to the house music as they leave the nook for the balcony. Flanked by security hulks as champagne flutes periodically manifest from the ether, they are joined by a few pals, including Justin Timberlake and another guy Aguilera refers to as “an old Mouseketeer friend.” Before long, His Purple Badness takes the stage.
In a shimmering orange sport jacket and turquoise guitar, Prince shares vocals with a belting, Afroed soul sister and two preposterously hot backup singers in go-go skirts with Ikettes moves. Aguilera has met The Artist before, and at five-two could even look him in the eye (“He actually seemed smaller than me,” she says). When a deeply intoxicated white guy is pulled from the crowd and forced to…dance, sort of, Aguilera and Timberlake crack up, bending over the railing. “Man, that’s a cool step,” Prince says as the guy exits. “I’m stealin’ that.”
And when I look over at the petite singer beside me taking in the petite singer onstage, I realize something. Maybe it’s the distorting proximity to stardom, maybe it’s the neuron-addling Cristal, but for a moment the idea seems perfectly plausible. A giant talent in a tiny body. A flair for the brash and theatrical. A flagrant lewdness that’s part of the art.
Is Christina Aguilera the female Prince?
Mr. Fabulous
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..."Actually, Prince is the female Prince. If anyone, Aguilera is the female Eminem, that other compact, bleach-blond powerhouse from humble origins who suffered an abusive parent of the opposite sex and was subjected to the fangs of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. (Triumph's dis for Eminem: "My mom was a b*tch too, but I don't write songs about it." Triumph's dis for Aguilera: "It's like watching p*rn but the musici's not as good.") More crucially, they both have ruled in a traditionally black musical idiom, which makes them practically siblings (no wonder they've knocked heads).
Aguilera's singing bears only superficial similarities to the histrionic melismas regularly oversung on American Idol and its predecessor Star Search (on which she appeared as a child). She has much greater control, force and shading than most pop ululaters, and her voice has long been both huge and oddly mature. "She has an amazing God-given tone," says Geffen chairman Ron Fair, who signed Aguilera in 1998 after a stunning a cappella performance in his office when he was at RCA. "But it's also her ability to subdivide harmonies, what she hears when a chord is played, what springs into her mind, what her musical and stylistic impulses are -- it all comes from a really highly evolved intellect. When you can go from Herbie Hancock to Nelly to Andrea Bocelli to your own stuff, you know you're something pretty special."
She performed Mariah Carey's "Vision of Love" on local TV nailing every riff, including the dog-whistle altissimos, at only 10 years old. Legend also has it that Jessica Simpson was scared off from a vocal audition because it was coming after hers.
"Yeah, I've heard that story," Aguilera told me at dinner before the Prince show, laying the groundwork for a night of Cristal with a flute of Veuve Clicquot. "She's said that a few times."
You don't think it's true?
"Oh no, I know it's true."
Aguilera was a small, glowing presence across the booth from me in a candlelit French-Mediterranean place in West Hollywood. White-blond hair pulled tightly back, gold chains dangling down the V-neck of her sweater in a suggestively directional manner. After a quick cell-phone consultation with her husband --"Hey, baby, what's that salad you like here?" -- she ordered something leafy, plus the filet mignon. It was refreshing to see a body-conscious L.A. performing artist drink alcohol and eat steak, but it also made sense in this case: Large, robust mammals must die to feed that voice.
Though still so young, Aguilera has earned a certain world weariness having survived the epic Christina Aguilera saga thus far. She was part of the '90s-teen-pop's graduating class, and yet her vocal talents have always placed her well apart from her peers. A star at 7 (singing block parties and soon doing the national anthem for Penguins and Pirates home games), a TV performer at 12 (with Britney, JC, and Justin on The All New Mickey Mouse Club) and a breakout phenomenon at 18 (with the number one hit "Genie in a Bottle"). Not bad, considering the less-than-ideal conditions off stage.
In elementary school, she'd been harassed and threatened frequently enough by fame-resenting Pittsburgh bullies that her family had to move. More hurtfully, her father, Fausto, whom they left when Aguilera was 7, battered her mother. Even Aguilera's earliest memories of music are shaded with the melancholy from the trauma. "It was my only way to escape the abuse," she said. "I would run up to my room and listen to the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. I'd open my windows and sing along, The hills are alive..."
Of course, none of this came through in her stage-managed debut, Christina Aguilera, with its flirty bubblegum hits "Genie in a Bottle" and "What a Girl Wants." But the wave of fame that followed brought more trouble. An abusive father led to a manager whom she sued for, among other things, fraud (the case was dismissed after a settlement was reached) -- along with betrayals by staff that included a trusted bodyguard, "like a big brother to me," whom she said was stealing from her. When success allowed her at 20 to seize the reins for her follow-up album, Stripped, the notoriously rauncy single, "Dirrty" and scandalous David LaChapelle-directed video recast the singer as a kind of New Skank on the Block. Lost in ensuing media froth was just how angry and sad a record the largely Aguilera-written Stripped really was.
"I was not the kind of artist that had my mommy hold my hand and my daddy managing my career," she said emphatically, over dinner. "It was just me. I was in New York at 15 all by myself, and eventually, it was a hard space to be in." The album's main thrust was largely misunderstood. "Strippedwas really me saying everything that was inside, stripped down to who I am, regardless of everyone around me." She called it "an accumulation. After years of being told how to dress, what to wear, not to be provocative in the least --and I'm a very sexual person, it's just part of my nature to portray that in my art; it's part of my artistic expression. And my management was so unsupportive, making me do these stupid online Beanie Baby contests" --pitching her hard to the pubescent demo. "This whole image was pushed on me-- and thank God for it, it got my foot in the door -- but it was really hard for me. I had a lot of stuff pent up."
But while recording the edgier Stripped provided catharsis, it also brought yet more guy problems-- in the form of a producer who left deep wounds of one sort or another (she will not go into specifics). "He's not worthy of mentioning," she said. "It's in the past, and I've buried the whole thing. I'll just say he's a despicable person and a sorry excuse for a man." One more in a long line of despicable males that left her doubting whether there was any other kind.
When Aguilera was beginning work on Stripped, Ron Fair, who'd become her mentor, had the inspired suggestion that she try working with a female producer. He hooked up with Linda Perry, former singer-songwriter from the early 90's San Fransisco alt-rock band 4 Non Blondes. They immediately hit it off, and within a few months Perry happened to play Aguilera a song she'd been working on, the career-transforming hit "Beautiful." The ballsy big-girl ballad let Aguilera take a significant step past the holographic pop p*rn she'd come up on and into something a little deeper. Call it neo-soul.
"The first time she sat down at the piano and started singing it, "Aguilera recalls, " I was like, 'I have to sing this song!' I completely related to it in that moment in my life, I felt so vunerable. In the bridge when it says, No matter what we do, no matter what we say/ We're the song inside the tune/Full of beautiful mistakes.... It takes a strong connection to oneself to say words like that."
It's 11pm on a Thursday at Perry's recording studio in North Hollywood. Flanked by a golden Buddah and lit by candles, a demure studious-looking, Aguilera sits sipping a large coffee , wearing a white tee over wrist-covering long sleeves, hair pulled back into a schoolmarmish bun, listening intently to Perry's latest mix. Baroquely pierced and tattooed, Perry sits behind the console in a reggae-ish stocking cap. The olive-skinned producer with the kohlrimmed eyes looks- if you can imagine this - like a pretty Keith Richards. "Okay, here we go," she says.
From wall-mounted speakers, a spooky '20s carnival fantasia comes swirling up, a female barker's voice promising thrills and chills with the dark costs implicit in the musical drama. Welcome to the greatest show...greatest show on earth. Then, as the orchrestra sweeps into a striding Abbey Road- evoking chord progression, a sinewy, stadium-sized alto comes soaring over it. The contrast between that voice and the tiny bookish-looking source of it sitting before me raises haris on the back of my neck.
When it stops, Aguilera nods and glances at her notepad. "It's cool," she says. "I love the music, but I can't hear enough of you." It's Perry doing the barker's voice. "Also, I lost some of the epic sound on the chorus."
Drawing from Perry's extensive vintage-record collection, the album uses an orchestra, choir, string quartet, and jazz horn players, plus jury-rigged recording techniques like a beat-up kick drum mike with fabric over it for the scratchy blues-field-recording sound of "I Got Trouble," as well as a bit of method singing, Aguilera sang "Trouble" when she had a cold and drank Maker's Mark to perform the raw-sounding "Save Me from Myself." The touchstones are Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Judy Garland --"what I used to call my 'fun music' when I was 8 years old," Aguilera says.
"I think he's a great little singer," says Etta James, now a friend, who hears some of Billie Holiday's sadness in Aguilera's voice. "For a young girl like that to be singing real songs? I mean she's headed for the pop market, but she can do everything. She's like somebody that was born at another time. An old soul."
A gritty rock yin to Aguilera's R&B yang, Linda Perry had to build up significant trust with Aguilera to lead her into exploring the less Star Search-winning sides of herself. "I would never be able to be as open with anybody else," says Aguilera. "Like that song 'Save Me from Myself.' [It's recorded] upclose on the mike, with no ad-libs, no nothing, and that's so not like me. No effects, no reverb --and i'm a reverb queen. Every scratch, every little imperfection is there. I think we push eachother to go places that we normally wouldn't go."
Aguilera is dedicating this emotionally naked song to Bratman, whose role in her life seems to be exactly what the title suggests. They met during the debacle with her Atlanta producer, became close friends immediately, and then, when Bratman moved out to L.A., inseperable.
"Before Jordy I don't think I've ever encountered what a real man is," she says. "Most men that I've known in my life-0 and growing up with an abusive father, trying to find a father figure in sketchy guys -- tended to and generally just dogs. That's what I thought men were. He's the first guy that treated me like I feel a woman should be treated." And it must have been before Bratman: He's a very strong person, a strong man, who will carry me through any difficult time in my life, who is always there to save me. He can get me out of my own box, my own depression. He's my angel. He saves me in so many ways.
I've got to believe its a true testament to his love that Bratman willingly subjected his heretofore undesecrated flesh to the tattoo needle (Aguilera, of course, is copiously inked and pierced.) As a wedding gift, hip-hop graffiti artist Mister Cartoon gave the couple a set of his-and her tattoo designs. On her back: I AM MY BELOVED AND MY BELOVED IS MINE. On his arm: I LOVE CA FOREVER, but in hebrew characters. During the wedding, which featured white roses, crystal chandeliers, a five tier wedding cake, and a hymn from the soul-saving sountrack to The Sound of Music, Aguilera was coaxed into singing a song, the Etta James classic "At Last." And when goofy dude from Riverdale, hardly believing his good luck- ran onstage, hoiseted the satin-clad package , and with a yard-wide grin yelled, "This is my fvcking wife!"
Etta James remembers meeting Bratman at a party, " I walked up to him and said, 'You gonna take care of her?' And he said, 'Oh, I do, I do, I do.' And I said, 'Well you make sure you take care of a woman like that. She's like a lil doll baby, you know?"
Four months into married life and eighteen years into stardom, Aguilera seems prepped for a new and quite different path - even attempting some equanimity with her sister divas. "I think Kelly Clarkson has a really powerful voice," she says. "She's really good. And when I met her, she was a real sweetheart. Some of these girls, like even Lindsay Lohan, when I run into them they're so complimentary, saying how they grew up listening to me and all this. And I forget, I mean, I feel young still, but these girls are even younger. But I never want to get to the place where I'm so...I dunno, diva-ed out for people that have admired me to be around me." Like it was for Aguilera to be around say, Mariah Carey. "She was never cool to me," she says, "to the point that one time we were at a party and I think she got really drunk, and she had just really derogatory things to say to me in front of..." she trails off. "but it was at that time that she had that breakdown, so she might have been very medicated."
The question is, does showbiz generosity plus a cozy new marriage signal the softening of Christina Aguilera? Not if you believe the club track "Still Dirrty" in which she assures her fans that she's Still got that nasty in me/ Still got that dirrty degree.../ Still got that freak in me. Then there's the song "Nasty Naughty Boy," which includes the rare poetry Now you better give me a taste / Put your icing on my cake. I ask how her mom feels when her daughter gets so risque.
"My mom has been so supportive, she really has," Aguilera says, before exiting the restaurant into a blinding fireflight of paparazzi and climbing into her white Rolls-Royce.
"And you know?" she adds, suddenly arching her shapely eyebrows. "I don't get it from nowhere." She laughs, "Let's just say that."
Apologies if you see any spellings...
thanks to a few posters at the LiveDaily Forums.
Aguilera's singing bears only superficial similarities to the histrionic melismas regularly oversung on American Idol and its predecessor Star Search (on which she appeared as a child). She has much greater control, force and shading than most pop ululaters, and her voice has long been both huge and oddly mature. "She has an amazing God-given tone," says Geffen chairman Ron Fair, who signed Aguilera in 1998 after a stunning a cappella performance in his office when he was at RCA. "But it's also her ability to subdivide harmonies, what she hears when a chord is played, what springs into her mind, what her musical and stylistic impulses are -- it all comes from a really highly evolved intellect. When you can go from Herbie Hancock to Nelly to Andrea Bocelli to your own stuff, you know you're something pretty special."
She performed Mariah Carey's "Vision of Love" on local TV nailing every riff, including the dog-whistle altissimos, at only 10 years old. Legend also has it that Jessica Simpson was scared off from a vocal audition because it was coming after hers.
"Yeah, I've heard that story," Aguilera told me at dinner before the Prince show, laying the groundwork for a night of Cristal with a flute of Veuve Clicquot. "She's said that a few times."
You don't think it's true?
"Oh no, I know it's true."
Aguilera was a small, glowing presence across the booth from me in a candlelit French-Mediterranean place in West Hollywood. White-blond hair pulled tightly back, gold chains dangling down the V-neck of her sweater in a suggestively directional manner. After a quick cell-phone consultation with her husband --"Hey, baby, what's that salad you like here?" -- she ordered something leafy, plus the filet mignon. It was refreshing to see a body-conscious L.A. performing artist drink alcohol and eat steak, but it also made sense in this case: Large, robust mammals must die to feed that voice.
Though still so young, Aguilera has earned a certain world weariness having survived the epic Christina Aguilera saga thus far. She was part of the '90s-teen-pop's graduating class, and yet her vocal talents have always placed her well apart from her peers. A star at 7 (singing block parties and soon doing the national anthem for Penguins and Pirates home games), a TV performer at 12 (with Britney, JC, and Justin on The All New Mickey Mouse Club) and a breakout phenomenon at 18 (with the number one hit "Genie in a Bottle"). Not bad, considering the less-than-ideal conditions off stage.
In elementary school, she'd been harassed and threatened frequently enough by fame-resenting Pittsburgh bullies that her family had to move. More hurtfully, her father, Fausto, whom they left when Aguilera was 7, battered her mother. Even Aguilera's earliest memories of music are shaded with the melancholy from the trauma. "It was my only way to escape the abuse," she said. "I would run up to my room and listen to the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. I'd open my windows and sing along, The hills are alive..."
Of course, none of this came through in her stage-managed debut, Christina Aguilera, with its flirty bubblegum hits "Genie in a Bottle" and "What a Girl Wants." But the wave of fame that followed brought more trouble. An abusive father led to a manager whom she sued for, among other things, fraud (the case was dismissed after a settlement was reached) -- along with betrayals by staff that included a trusted bodyguard, "like a big brother to me," whom she said was stealing from her. When success allowed her at 20 to seize the reins for her follow-up album, Stripped, the notoriously rauncy single, "Dirrty" and scandalous David LaChapelle-directed video recast the singer as a kind of New Skank on the Block. Lost in ensuing media froth was just how angry and sad a record the largely Aguilera-written Stripped really was.
"I was not the kind of artist that had my mommy hold my hand and my daddy managing my career," she said emphatically, over dinner. "It was just me. I was in New York at 15 all by myself, and eventually, it was a hard space to be in." The album's main thrust was largely misunderstood. "Strippedwas really me saying everything that was inside, stripped down to who I am, regardless of everyone around me." She called it "an accumulation. After years of being told how to dress, what to wear, not to be provocative in the least --and I'm a very sexual person, it's just part of my nature to portray that in my art; it's part of my artistic expression. And my management was so unsupportive, making me do these stupid online Beanie Baby contests" --pitching her hard to the pubescent demo. "This whole image was pushed on me-- and thank God for it, it got my foot in the door -- but it was really hard for me. I had a lot of stuff pent up."
But while recording the edgier Stripped provided catharsis, it also brought yet more guy problems-- in the form of a producer who left deep wounds of one sort or another (she will not go into specifics). "He's not worthy of mentioning," she said. "It's in the past, and I've buried the whole thing. I'll just say he's a despicable person and a sorry excuse for a man." One more in a long line of despicable males that left her doubting whether there was any other kind.
When Aguilera was beginning work on Stripped, Ron Fair, who'd become her mentor, had the inspired suggestion that she try working with a female producer. He hooked up with Linda Perry, former singer-songwriter from the early 90's San Fransisco alt-rock band 4 Non Blondes. They immediately hit it off, and within a few months Perry happened to play Aguilera a song she'd been working on, the career-transforming hit "Beautiful." The ballsy big-girl ballad let Aguilera take a significant step past the holographic pop p*rn she'd come up on and into something a little deeper. Call it neo-soul.
"The first time she sat down at the piano and started singing it, "Aguilera recalls, " I was like, 'I have to sing this song!' I completely related to it in that moment in my life, I felt so vunerable. In the bridge when it says, No matter what we do, no matter what we say/ We're the song inside the tune/Full of beautiful mistakes.... It takes a strong connection to oneself to say words like that."
It's 11pm on a Thursday at Perry's recording studio in North Hollywood. Flanked by a golden Buddah and lit by candles, a demure studious-looking, Aguilera sits sipping a large coffee , wearing a white tee over wrist-covering long sleeves, hair pulled back into a schoolmarmish bun, listening intently to Perry's latest mix. Baroquely pierced and tattooed, Perry sits behind the console in a reggae-ish stocking cap. The olive-skinned producer with the kohlrimmed eyes looks- if you can imagine this - like a pretty Keith Richards. "Okay, here we go," she says.
From wall-mounted speakers, a spooky '20s carnival fantasia comes swirling up, a female barker's voice promising thrills and chills with the dark costs implicit in the musical drama. Welcome to the greatest show...greatest show on earth. Then, as the orchrestra sweeps into a striding Abbey Road- evoking chord progression, a sinewy, stadium-sized alto comes soaring over it. The contrast between that voice and the tiny bookish-looking source of it sitting before me raises haris on the back of my neck.
When it stops, Aguilera nods and glances at her notepad. "It's cool," she says. "I love the music, but I can't hear enough of you." It's Perry doing the barker's voice. "Also, I lost some of the epic sound on the chorus."
Drawing from Perry's extensive vintage-record collection, the album uses an orchestra, choir, string quartet, and jazz horn players, plus jury-rigged recording techniques like a beat-up kick drum mike with fabric over it for the scratchy blues-field-recording sound of "I Got Trouble," as well as a bit of method singing, Aguilera sang "Trouble" when she had a cold and drank Maker's Mark to perform the raw-sounding "Save Me from Myself." The touchstones are Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Judy Garland --"what I used to call my 'fun music' when I was 8 years old," Aguilera says.
"I think he's a great little singer," says Etta James, now a friend, who hears some of Billie Holiday's sadness in Aguilera's voice. "For a young girl like that to be singing real songs? I mean she's headed for the pop market, but she can do everything. She's like somebody that was born at another time. An old soul."
A gritty rock yin to Aguilera's R&B yang, Linda Perry had to build up significant trust with Aguilera to lead her into exploring the less Star Search-winning sides of herself. "I would never be able to be as open with anybody else," says Aguilera. "Like that song 'Save Me from Myself.' [It's recorded] upclose on the mike, with no ad-libs, no nothing, and that's so not like me. No effects, no reverb --and i'm a reverb queen. Every scratch, every little imperfection is there. I think we push eachother to go places that we normally wouldn't go."
Aguilera is dedicating this emotionally naked song to Bratman, whose role in her life seems to be exactly what the title suggests. They met during the debacle with her Atlanta producer, became close friends immediately, and then, when Bratman moved out to L.A., inseperable.
"Before Jordy I don't think I've ever encountered what a real man is," she says. "Most men that I've known in my life-0 and growing up with an abusive father, trying to find a father figure in sketchy guys -- tended to and generally just dogs. That's what I thought men were. He's the first guy that treated me like I feel a woman should be treated." And it must have been before Bratman: He's a very strong person, a strong man, who will carry me through any difficult time in my life, who is always there to save me. He can get me out of my own box, my own depression. He's my angel. He saves me in so many ways.
I've got to believe its a true testament to his love that Bratman willingly subjected his heretofore undesecrated flesh to the tattoo needle (Aguilera, of course, is copiously inked and pierced.) As a wedding gift, hip-hop graffiti artist Mister Cartoon gave the couple a set of his-and her tattoo designs. On her back: I AM MY BELOVED AND MY BELOVED IS MINE. On his arm: I LOVE CA FOREVER, but in hebrew characters. During the wedding, which featured white roses, crystal chandeliers, a five tier wedding cake, and a hymn from the soul-saving sountrack to The Sound of Music, Aguilera was coaxed into singing a song, the Etta James classic "At Last." And when goofy dude from Riverdale, hardly believing his good luck- ran onstage, hoiseted the satin-clad package , and with a yard-wide grin yelled, "This is my fvcking wife!"
Etta James remembers meeting Bratman at a party, " I walked up to him and said, 'You gonna take care of her?' And he said, 'Oh, I do, I do, I do.' And I said, 'Well you make sure you take care of a woman like that. She's like a lil doll baby, you know?"
Four months into married life and eighteen years into stardom, Aguilera seems prepped for a new and quite different path - even attempting some equanimity with her sister divas. "I think Kelly Clarkson has a really powerful voice," she says. "She's really good. And when I met her, she was a real sweetheart. Some of these girls, like even Lindsay Lohan, when I run into them they're so complimentary, saying how they grew up listening to me and all this. And I forget, I mean, I feel young still, but these girls are even younger. But I never want to get to the place where I'm so...I dunno, diva-ed out for people that have admired me to be around me." Like it was for Aguilera to be around say, Mariah Carey. "She was never cool to me," she says, "to the point that one time we were at a party and I think she got really drunk, and she had just really derogatory things to say to me in front of..." she trails off. "but it was at that time that she had that breakdown, so she might have been very medicated."
The question is, does showbiz generosity plus a cozy new marriage signal the softening of Christina Aguilera? Not if you believe the club track "Still Dirrty" in which she assures her fans that she's Still got that nasty in me/ Still got that dirrty degree.../ Still got that freak in me. Then there's the song "Nasty Naughty Boy," which includes the rare poetry Now you better give me a taste / Put your icing on my cake. I ask how her mom feels when her daughter gets so risque.
"My mom has been so supportive, she really has," Aguilera says, before exiting the restaurant into a blinding fireflight of paparazzi and climbing into her white Rolls-Royce.
"And you know?" she adds, suddenly arching her shapely eyebrows. "I don't get it from nowhere." She laughs, "Let's just say that."
Apologies if you see any spellings...
thanks to a few posters at the LiveDaily Forums.
cutiecutediana
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Thank u for the article very much!
Miss Dalloway
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She said some pretty nasty things about Mariah Carey in the interview!And i think that is not a nice thing to do.So Mariah responded with a really cool statment!Why does she need to do that just sing dont start dissing people so your album will get more publicity!I am disappointed!
Caroliiine
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Emil said:
She said nasty things about Mariah?
I remember she used to say Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston were her idols growing up. As for the shoot + cover ... if Paris Hilton had done this shoot, everyone would say it's skanky. But because it's Christina, everyone loves it. (not everyone in the literal sense)
OriginalSin
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Caroliiine said:She said nasty things about Mariah?
As for the shoot + cover ... if Paris Hilton had done this shoot, everyone would say it's skanky. But because it's Christina, everyone loves it. (not everyone in the literal sense)
Actually I disagree, but only because if you read people's responses in this thread, you see that a lot of people don't like the shoot.
Caroliiine
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OriginalSin said:
I know, that's why I said "not literally" because I know not everyone likes it. I just meant that since it's Christina Aguilera, there are more people saying they like it whereas if it was Paris Hilton, there would be less people saying the liked it.
Kinda like how with Paris Hilton, more people say "Go away, you're not famous!" to her than they do to Nicole Richie, who is famous for the same reasons as Paris.
Btw... I'm not a Paris Hilton fan at all, I just used her cause she's a good example of a "good" celebrity vs. "bad".
OriginalSin
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Caroliiine said:
Well I knew you didn't mean literally, I didn't either (I kinda consider the overall reaction in this thread to be "everyone hates it" which is why I disagreed at first). But I understand what you are saying now
I, therefore, agree 
gravytrain
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Christina looks very hot! IMHO
not a waif, and thats a +
not a waif, and thats a +
I subscribed my boyfriend to GQ (what was I thinking!?), and he brought the GQ to work and all the men were ogling over Aguilera's photos. But do men really like her? As I woman, I feel that I wouldn't be attracted to her if I were a man... does that sound strange? These photos just wouldn't do it... yecht. Maybe it's the hair... or... I'm not sure...
brokenenglish
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What's not to like for a man?....
she has a nice face, big cans, a butt and thighs and a provocative sexual image.
Who knows if they could take her personality or reported attitude but I bet they don't mind looking at her.
My boyfriend says she's hot but seems almost cartoon like....
but that's another thing about men- they all think certain cartoon women are hot!
she has a nice face, big cans, a butt and thighs and a provocative sexual image.
Who knows if they could take her personality or reported attitude but I bet they don't mind looking at her.
My boyfriend says she's hot but seems almost cartoon like....
but that's another thing about men- they all think certain cartoon women are hot!
