christina aguilera

A Week With Christina Aguilera's "Back To Basics": Day 3

25 August 2006
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Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Abby Rodriguez
Christina Aguilera is kind of rad. Kind of. She has her dashes, her splashes of importance, when she exerts her dominance over the other female artists (and hell, even a lot of the good for nothing male artists) of her time. She can be a real dragon, a beast of slinky, hornball-ish proportions, contorting her voice to sound like lingerie (it really does sound like something lacey and designed specifically to barely cover the frequently blurred-out positions on the human body). She can also sound like a nightclub amplified, a wounded beau or bird and the material to make a majestic stained glass window. She’s got some brilliance in her, but it feels like even here, when she’s stepping out onto the plank, mocking the circling alligators below, she’s still not going far enough to write her own life story. She’s presenting herself in truncated, slideshow versions on “Back To Basics,” but lifting too many hints from her heroines. She is hitchhiking to her next destination when she needs to just walk her own passage, comfort ability be damned. She needs to really get down to the nitty gritty because she is very close. It’s an interesting investigation of some of the glamorous, timeless voices in soul, jazz and blues, but that’s not really Aguilera, not when she still wants to bring some of the risqué notions and entendres into the pump house. And that’s what she needs to do. She needs to seclude herself from the idols for the next record and trust that she knows exactly where she needs to be. One track – “Save Me From Myself”—shows that she’s not too far away from getting there. Otherwise, the songs on the second disc of this set are merely good songs with a strong familiarity. She has the background, now she just needs the foreground. She needs to stop singing about how she’s misunderstood and going to do things her own way as she spends the ENTIRE first disc doing (just get to it – I thought explaining yourself was what you used interviews for, not the actual art) and actually do them. Go there. See what the view has to offer Christina.

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