The room goes silent. Two dozen record-label honchos freeze as the disc
containing new tracks by their biggest artist jams in the drive. Is the
singer who recorded those songs about to throw one of the wobblies to which
she is rumoured to be prone? And who’d be the poor tape op in these
circumstances? Not surprisingly, the young fellow struggling to fix the
problem looks mortified. But, turning to him, Christina Aguilera positively
purrs: “Take it out real quick,” she suggests, “and wipe it off.”
If Aguilera had made a remark as innuendo-rich as that back in 2002, how we’d
all have sniggered. That was the year when, casting off her teen-pop image,
she scandalised polite society with the video for her single Dirrty. Her 5ft
2in frame clad in bottomless leather riding chaps, the singer, rechristened
Xtina, preened and pranced her way through a song that invited her intended
to “Give all you got/Just hit the spot”. On Saturday Night Live, the actress
Sarah Michelle Gellar mimicked Aguilera, saying: “Once people see this
video, they’ll stop seeing me as this bubble-gum ho and start seeing me as
an actual ho.” Speaking about the video now, Aguilera says: “I’ll always
back it up, even when I’m 50 years old. Hopefully, I’ll still fit into those
chaps.”
The songs those label bosses have gathered to hear are taken from Aguilera’s
new album, Back to Basics. It’s a mark of her success — more than 20m copies
of her self- titled 1999 debut and its follow-up, Stripped, have been sold —
and the clout it has given her that the 25-year-old can get away with
releasing a double album. While disc one (chiefly produced by one of the
titans of 1990s East Coast hip-hop, DJ Premier) echoes and thrums with the
hooks, beats, power ballads and emotive vocal runs that are her trademark,
disc two, helmed by the uber-hitmaker and long-time Aguilera collaborator
Linda Perry, is determinedly retro — going right the way back to the
speakeasies of the interwar years. It’s far from standard pop fare, and at
80 minutes and 22 tracks, Back to Basics is arguably a tough sell.
Standing in front of the mixing desk, Aguilera is doing her best to confirm a
reputation for minimal eye contact. She gulps for air; her words fall over
themselves. At first, her unease seems endearing. Then you catch yourself
thinking: maybe those nerves are down not to humility, but rather to the
strangeness, the novelty, even, of the situation she finds herself in. Maybe
she simply doesn’t spend time any more in such untested, questioning
company.
Later, in a crepuscular corner of her favoured Beverly Hills hotel, Aguilera
says: “There aren’t many opportunities I get, honestly, to mingle with new
people, because of the trust issues. You never quite get a read on who’s
being fake and who’s being real. It’s hard for me to make new friends. You
have to understand how many insincere people come up to you when you’re in
the limelight.”
Her as-yet-gentle giant of a bodyguard sits nearby. Eye contact is now
full-on. She’s keen to stress that she isn’t complaining — “I can’t sit and
feel sorry for myself” — but, while that “mingle” may not be quite on a par
with Liz Hurley’s alleged description of non-celebrities as “civilians”,
it’s revealing nonetheless. She is different from the rest of us. How could
she not be? This is an important moment for Aguilera. However much the label
people applaud during the playback, however much she talks about the power
her success bestows on her, the singer knows she’s testing new waters with
her third album. When I ask her if she ever considered really pushing the
envelope, and hang the consequences, the tone of her rhetorical answer is
incredulous: “And not worry about having a hit record?”
It’s important in another respect, too. Her career trajectory — local
celebrity in her Pittsburgh neighbourhood; adolescent star, alongside
Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, on Disney’s The New Mickey Mouse Club
television show; Grammy-winning breakthrough artist with the smash-hit
single Genie in a Bottle; vamp on Dirrty; and emoting balladeer on its
follow-up, Beautiful — may have installed her in the most exclusive
celebrity firmament. But it has also led many to ask: what’s she all about,
where is she coming from, and where is she going? So, is Back to Basics
going to clear this fog, or thicken it? In the sense that the record covers
enough familiar bases for her to get away with the new ones she touches on,
the answer would seem to be: a bit of both. But what blasts most loudly and
clearly from the album is that extraordinary voice, an instrument about
which her idol and now friend Etta James has commented: “She’s like somebody
that was born at another time; an old soul.”
When she started releasing records, Aguilera was ridiculed for her crazed
coloratura runs. Back then, it seemed as if she had studied Mariah Carey
and, on an anything-you-can-do basis, resolved to squeal, ululate and warble
her way to the top of the charts. “On my first album,” she laughs, “Ron Fair
(her musical adviser) used to take me on one side and say, ‘You know, you
don’t have to give it all you’ve got. Hold back a little.’ But it was like
being let out of a cage.”
Last laughs are Aguilera’s speciality. Having fired her original management
team after her debut album, and thrown away the pop-candy rulebook they’d
written for her, she’s not averse, even now, to settling old scores.
Reflecting recently on the labels that turned her down when she first went
shopping for a deal, she sniped: “People definitely lost their jobs over
that, I later heard.” And the new song FUSS, apparently aimed at her former
songwriting partner Scott Storch, is unambiguous: “Looks like I didn’t need
you,” she sings. “Still got the album out.”
Add to that a veritable log jam of rumoured feuds with rival singers —
including Britney Spears, Pink, Kelly Osbourne and Mariah Carey — and her
reported insistence on items such as mineral water at a precise temperature,
and the d-word looms large. Ask her now about, say, Spears, and she looks
suddenly as if she’s jammed her teeth on a huge speech-denying toffee. So I
switch to the “diva” question. She started singing in public aged seven, I
say. She should be a complete nutcase. Is she? “No, no, no,” she cackles.
“I’m pretty down to earth. You could ask my husband. I have some weird
insecurities that I’m probably not going to get into — in fact, I’m
definitely not going to get into.”
Aguilera married Jordan Bratman, a former music A&R executive, last
November. You can see his round, bestubbled features in the background of
many pap shots, as his famously night-owl wife emerges in the small hours
from a club. Her horrid grounding in men through her violent father, whom
her mother fled, two daughters in tow, when Aguilera was six, caused her no
end of problems (the haunting Oh Mother, on the new album, addresses those
experiences unflinchingly) and made her, by her own admission, a bad picker.
Her father (from whom she remains estranged) and those wrong romantic
choices explain, she admits, the guards she erected around herself and her
notorious need for control. Another factor was the bullying she endured from
classmates envious of her early success, which included her mother’s car
tyres being slashed and the dancefloor at her college prom night emptying
when her first single came through the PA.
“When you have a difficult childhood,” she says, “you never want to feel
helpless in a situation ever again. But I’m thankful for the fact that I
grew up in a chaotic childhood, because it really drives me.”
Bratman is relaxed, she insists, about her more risqué incarnations. On the
new album, they include such wonderfully dirty tracks as the latest single,
Ain’t No Other Man, and Nasty Naughty Boy; and, on another song, the lyrics
“I want to give you a little taste of the sugar below my waist”. When I
remark on the latter song, Aguilera lets out one of the dirtiest laughs
since Barbara Windsor’s heyday. And it returns, gale force, when she
discusses her recent purchases of works by the guerrilla artist Banksy, one
of which features Queen Victoria in a compromising position with another
woman. It is apparently destined for the living-room wall of the house she
and Bratman are buying.
The woman who once admitted to smashing plates as a form of primal therapy,
and who used to run upstairs as a girl and sing along to The Sound of Music
to drown out the rows, is now, she says, “in the happiest place in my life”.
For all the cosmetic costuming provided by her current image of Jean Harlow
peroxide and scarlet lips, she looks, finally, as pretty as one had always
suspected she was.
People are already questioning the “authenticity” of her journey back to what
she calls the “fun music” of her youth, the records her grandmother played
her by singers such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. But
what does “authentic” mean? An original recording presumably fits the bill.
Is a new one steeped in that original’s ethos and spirit disqualified? That
seems nonsensical.
All I know, all Aguilera clearly believes for certain, all those nervous-eyed
label bosses are desperate to convince themselves of, is that Back to Basics
is an extraordinary album for one of the world’s biggest stars to make.
Instead of a cynical, joyless sequence of autopiloted R&B, the record is
a thrilling testament to the power the singer wields, the ambition and
talent she has, and the larynx she wraps round the package. Surely this is
what we want from a star: a vast-lunged, occasionally stroppy diva, with
issues; a mass of contradictions with a core of calm certainty; a
protruding, petulant lower lip; a bod to kill for; a voice to die for;
possibly impossible; completely unstoppable.
“It’s my passion, my love,” she says. She’s talking about her career.
Back to Basics is out tomorrow on RCA
