If you were feeling “not yourself,” what would you do? Most people probably wouldn’t, it’s safe to say, slip into skintight bondage wear, pour black paint over their semi-naked self, or do any of the other countless naughty things that Christina Aguilera gets up to in her latest video. But then this consummate global pop superstar isn’t, of course, “most people.”
After a hiatus of four years, you could understand a desire to make an impact with Not Myself Tonight — the first single from Aguilera’s fourth studio album, Bionic. But getting tongues wagging over an outrageous video has become a little harder ever since the arrival of the 24-year-old Lady Gaga (who last week showed her mastery of shock tactics with the video for her single Alejandro). Comparisons have been inevitable, not all of them favorable. Aguilera, though, is characteristically circumspect. “I’ve been in this business for so long,” she sighs when we speak, “but I welcome all the newcomers and any similarities along the way.”
In any case, this gimp-suited Aguilera seems a lot further than a decade and a bit away from her 1990s incarnation. When she joined the New Mickey Mouse Club in 1993 she was a squeaky clean teen, grinning alongside Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. Her pop career started with an eponymous debut album 10 years ago whose lead single, Genie in a Bottle, was the biggest hit of 1999 in the US and won her an Ivor Novello award.
The song displayed that peculiarly American blend of “good girl” restraint and “bad girl” libido (“My body’s saying let’s go/But my heart is saying no”). By 2002 though, it was time to ditch the good girl. Reinventing herself as the saucier “Xtina” (in keeping with celebrity tradition, she had “Xtina” tattooed on her neck to mark this reincarnation), she released her second studio album, Stripped, and single Dirrty. Even that video, which included Aguilera’s famous bikini-and-chaps combination, now looks relatively tame alongside Not Myself Tonight.
Does she mind that people invariably think “saucepot” before they think “soprano”?
“I think it’s a given that people know what I can do vocally,” she says simply. Not for her, feigned modesty then (of any sort), but when you’ve clocked up five Grammy wins and sold more than 42 million records worldwide, screw modesty. And Celine Dion, not short of a bit of lung power herself, once described Aguilera as “probably the best vocalist in the world.”
At the start of this decade though, “worst dressed” was just as frequent a tag. Luckily, she is not the sort to care. Reflecting on some of those outfits, the Staten Island-born singer says: “I’m glad I had a moment to play and be a little out there. I’m glad I did more of that in my younger years because it just would not be OK or right at 60 years old to be wearing chaps.”
I protest. In a rare moment of unguarded humor she laughs: “Well we’ll see how well they hold up, OK? We’ll see if I can squeeze those suckers on at that age.”
That talk of “younger years” may make her sound prematurely senescent — Aguilera is, after all, still just 29 — but she’s famously been performing since she was six years old. Back in the 1980s she was known in Pittsburgh, where she grew up after her US army sergeant father and Spanish teacher mother divorced, as “the little girl with the big voice.” Legend has it that when other girls heard she was performing in local talent contests they’d pull out.
These days she incites more of a sisterly spirit of collaboration, as evidenced by Bionic’s many contributors, including riot grrrl feminists Le Tigre. Aguilera’s not shy of the odd feministic declaration herself. “I think all of us as women have this super-human quality,” she says. “We create life, we give life, we are the sources of life for our children — we’re all pretty bionic.”
Hence the title of the album, which has received generally positive reviews. And she adds: “I don’t think the creativity would have transpired the way it did had I not had my son and become a new mom.”
She married music marketing executive Jordan Bratman in 2005, and their son, Max Liron Bratman, was born in 2008. She’s interested, she says, in having more kids, but for now, “Bionic is my baby and that’s the way it is.”
But does her actual baby mind?
“There definitely are moments when he doesn’t want me to talk about work,” she says, “and I very much understand that but I have to feel fulfilled in every capacity of the woman that I am.”
It appears that fulfillment and sexiness are inextricable for Aguilera; if you suspected motherhood might have mellowed her, think again.
“For a while your body is definitely not your body and you very willingly give it up for your child, but now I feel more confident and comfortable with what my body can do,” she explains. “Plus, I’m just a very sexual person by nature — that’s partly why I agreed to do the movie that I did — I just think the art of the tease is a beautiful art form.”
She’s referring to Burlesque, a film due out in November in the US in which she plays a small-town girl who makes her way from cocktail waitress to stage star. Not Myself Tonight comes, she claims, from feeling somewhat lost while on set.
“Being in that parallel universe and seeing these people every day becomes your reality and it was definitely a world that I felt I was losing myself to,” she says. “By the time I was nearing the end of production there was all this pent-up energy and frustration that needed to be let out. This is my, ‘I don’t give a shit and I’m going to be back to myself’ record!”
Heaven forbid anyone disagree with Aguilera, but I hope she’d concede that, for her, “not giving a shit” is happily nothing new.
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