Reactors are ready, Miss Aguilera. Commence hyperskank sequence.
Christina Aguilera insists her new album’s title, “Stripped,” is not a reference to removing her clothes, but even the most casual observer couldn’t ignore the coincidence. Most of America got its first taste of the album via the lead single, “Dirrty,” and its accompanying video, a heartfelt love-letter to boxing ring girls and crotchless panties starring Aguilera herself as the tongue-pierced heroine of a hellish skank-orgy.
As the nation’s collective jaws dropped in disbelief of her brazen raunchiness, many wondered what became of the flaxen-haired teen queen who first seduced America with “Genie in a Bottle” from her eponymous debut in 1999. Was this caterwauling chaps-and-underwear tramp the same ex-Mouseketeer who contributed sappy ballads to the soundtracks from Disney’s “Pocahontas” and “Mulan?”
Same girl, different presentation, and she swears this version is the real one. The old digestible Christina, she says, was just a put-on, a charade to seduce record-buyers in the height of a blondie-pop frenzy. She never intended to maintain that image and now she’s ready to reveal herself as the foul-mouthed, sex-bloated rusty nail she’s been holding back for so long.
“Coming from the height of all that teen-pop phenomenon, craze, whatever you wanna call it, I was not really myself through all that,” she said in one televised interview, “I wasn’t comfortable living through that imagery.”
That was then; “Stripped” is now. Armed with the WWF’s subtlety and Kelly Osborne’s vocabulary, Aguilera presumably unleashed this gem in an effort to alienate any fans she ever had. It’s hard to imagine the supporters who sock-hopped to “Come On Over” and “What a Girl Wants” identifying with anything on this album. “Can’t Hold Us Down” is a woman’s lib nightmare, amounting to a defiant “I can do anything you can do, better” aimed at Eminem’s hokey chauvinism.
“When a female fires back suddenly big talker don’t know how to act/ So he does what every little boy would do/ Makin’ up a few false rumors or two,” she sings on the track, assailing the double standards she recognizes in society. “The guy gets all the glory, the more he can score/ While the girl can do the same, and yet you call her a whore.”
While that poignancy sunk in, Aguilera decided to further empower women by mud-wrestling with a porn star on “Dirrty,” TRL’s top video in its first week of airplay. Nothing spells gender equity like 8-inch stilettos and knee pads.
Just before Aguilera’s social commentary induces dry heaves, producer Linda Perry sprinkles on some cheese by way of a schmaltzy piano ballad like “Beautiful,” the album’s latest single. Perry, the former 4 Non Blondes frontwoman, penned “Beautiful” and three other tracks on “Stripped,” but couldn’t manage to breathe any humanity into this album. Thirteen other writers, including Alicia Keys, Glen Ballard and Aguilera herself, contributed to the record and the result is an artistically muddled, sexually-charged playbill for a musical no one wants to hear.
Sadly, Aguilera doesn’t seem to have any tricks up her sleeve for future redemptions but who knows what she’s got up her bikini top.