(no subject)

[cimorene]

text of the new christina article from maxim blender, credit to stenaline via sparkly_girls; not entirely free of typos.

Just three years ago, Christina Aguilera was a demure teen pop star singing about genies in bottles. Then came the nipple piercings. And the racy outfits. And now, a new album that reveals her to be darker, edgier, and dirrtier than anyone would ever have thought possible. So is the star who reecently suffered a "breakdown," like, OK? "Obviously not."



Above a single piercing, her lips are painted black. Deep, dark eye shadow surrounds each doe-eye look.
By no stretch of the imagination is this the playful, bright eyed, bare-midriffed teen who sang "Genie in a bottle," that incomparable anthem to nascent teen sexuality. This is no perky teen dream. This is XTIna, as she styles herself- and the name is tattooed on the back of her neck.
This Christmas lounges on a sofa for the Blender photo shoot, legs splayedwide, unself-consciously flashing her nipple ring as she fastidiousely arranges her breasts in her bra. The vice president of publicity for Aguilera's record label peers in nervously, worried what these torrid poses will mean for Aguilera's image. Sexy and striking, she is dressed like a hooker from the Sci-Fi Channel. And the dress code for today's photo shoot comes largely from Xtina. "She's been wanting to do a shoot like this her whole life," an attendant whispers.
This is another step in Xtina's campaign to wipe fluffy-sweatered, Christmas-album Christina from our collective memories. The thought of teen Christina makes her cringe, she says.
"It wasn't completely conservative," which she declares of her former image. "To a lot of people, a virginal little pop star showing her navel was shocking. Not that I ever said I was a virgin," she cackles, unable to resist a sideswipe at Britney Spears.

B-- People wouldn't expect the old Christina to have a pierced nipple, maybe.
CA-- "No..."

B-- Was that painful?
CA-- "The clamp was. I've had it done three times. I had both of them at first. I took the piercings out for a while, and then I had the right one done again. I don't know. Obviously I like it." There have been rumors that she has had her breasts augmented, and the New York Post hinted recently that Aguilera has had her nether regions pierced as well; she admits only to a total of 11 piercings. "Uh, I'm running out of places," she says with deliberate vagueness, then laughs.

B-- So which was the most painful?
CA-- Again she bursts into loud laughter. "Mmm," she says. "Probably...ah... [long pause] the nipple." Shes explains that she acquired most of her metalwork on tour. "It was a lack of being able to express myself in other ways," she says. "A way of letting aggression or anger out in other ways."

B--- What---like, "I'm depressed. Let's get pierced!"
CA__"Exactly. Thats why I have so many, I guess."
*****

Think back three long years ago, to 1999. Tech stocks were booming, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? monopolized prime time, and teen pop---- shiny, toothsome abd oh-so- chaste---- was dominant.
In any fact seemed to sum up the monopoly on chart wholesomeness pop held, it was that three of that years biggest stars---- Justin Timberlake of 'NSyne, Spears, and Aguilera---- had been child stars together on the Disney Channel's Mickry Mouse Club. They formed a perfect pop triangle: Spears was the cute virgin queen of pop, dating Timberlake and begging you to hit her one more time. From the start, Aguilera was cast as Spears's archrival--- and marketed as the one who would ultimately achieve greater long-term success, because---bitch, bitch--- she could really sing.
The Staten Island, New York born Aguilera was always presented as the pearl among swine. When she debuted, Ron Fair, at the time the senior vice president of A&R at RCA, said he had always dreamed of signing a "one- name act" like Barbra, Judy, Janet, or Madonna. Christina, he boasted to the press, would be the one. Such image-crafting helped her walk off with Best New Artist trophy at the 1999 Grammy's.
But teen stars grow up. The Xtina who is releasing Stripped is clearly embarrased about what made her famous. "If I had to make another record like that last one," she says, "I would quit the business." Remember, Christina Aguilera has sold more than 8 million copies.
Its natural for any 21 year old to hate facing the consequences of things she did at 18. But for Aguilera, that hated runs deeper than simple embarrasment. She wants to obliterate everything she stood for three years ago and start over.
A hint of this came with her appearance in last year's award winning "Lady Marmalade'' video alongside Mya, Pink, and Lil Kim, in which she sstrutted her stuff dressed as a fin-de-siecle Parisian street walker. In a sure sign of things to come, Aguilera says that of the "Lady Marmalade quartet, it was Lil Kim to whom she felt, and still feels closest. The success of the song also served to keep her career momentum going while she agonized over her sophomore album.
But not all of her attempts to distance herself from her neatly buffed pop image have been as successful. Her award show getups have beenroundly jeered by the fashion police, and her microskirted appearance at this year's MTV VMS's seemed only to betray a desperate attempt to erase all traces of teen pop Christina from public memory.
Now she's releasing Stripped. As we're learning to expect, she's no longer the girl who grew up wanting to be Julie Andrews. The word she uses most to describe where she is now is "edgy." "I'm showing the darker, edgier side of me," she says. She has just finished the photo shoot. In keeping with her new, sexually aggressive Xtina, it featured a topless photo--- her first ever--- with her blond extensions draped to hide her nipples.
"This is definitely my introduction," she says. "I knew it would be kind of hard, because everyone is used to seeing me as the "Genie In A Botle," "What A Girl Wants," whatever. The friggin' 'Come On Over' girl--- that is so anti-me." She recites the litany of her former hits with rising indignation, as though they were rocks she has to drag around with her.
Which makes you wonder why the new Xtina hates the old Christina so much.
*****

It's the day after the photo shoot. Aguilera awoke at 1 p.m. That's not unusual. The shoot went into the small hours of the morning, but she's a night person anyway, preferring to sleep through the daylight hours. She's always been afraid of the dark and is still sometimes plagued by nightmares. "To this day," she says "I can't be ina dark room by myself,or sleep at ngiht in the dark without some kind of light on--- or my dogs with me. It's a fear of mine. I know it's a very childish thing.
She's sitting in the meeting room of her manager's office in the Los Angelas neighborhood of Westwood, her legs up on a chair. She's dressed in baggy pants, a pale bandana and a thin white tank top that does little to hide her silver nipple ring beneath it.
"This record," she announces, "has been really tough for me to do. There were a lot of personal battles."
The last two years have certainly been a bumpy ride. It started in 2000 when Aguilera ditched Steve Kurtz, her once trusted manager. He was the one who spotted her at age 15,and had represented her ever since. Initially, she claimed that his frantic work schedule had exhausted her, leaving no time to develpoe her talent. That October she went further, suing Kurtz for fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and exercising "improper, undue, and inappropriate influence" over her professional career. (Kurts filed a counter lawsuit claiming breach of contact. The case has yet to be resolved.)
She was involved in legal action again last year when she tried--and failed-- to stop two producers who had taped demos with her when she was 14 and 15 from releasing the recordings under the title Just Be Free.
Meanwhile, her long term relationship with her former dancer Jorge Santos was falling apart. She had spent her teenage years focused on her career, and Santos was her first big romance.
"What sucks," she says, "is I always try and go for the guys who don't want to be in the spotlight----who can't deal with the pressure of dating someone like me. They're not as far ahead with their careers and life as they want to be," she says, " and they feel so inadequate."
The pair had shared a home in L.A.; theirs had been an intense relationship. Like her Irish mother, she had fallen for a Latino. The song "Infatuation," which survived the break up and made it onto Stripped,hints at how strongly Christina felt about Santos before the split:
"Mama used to ward me about those Latin lovers. Said, "I gave my heart too soon/ And thats how I became your mother,"
Neither her love life nor the prospects for a second album were helped by what happened next. Aguilera began working with a man she refers to---with some bitterness--- as "that producer." Their working partnership developed into what she calls a "personal relationship" that turned sour. "I went through a crazy first love and breakup, then got involved with a certain producer who didn't get any tracks on the record," she says with a mocking laugh. "That was my first experience with a player. I learned the hard way that people will say anything to get with you. I was played for, like, seven months by this dude.
She refuses, point blank, to divulge his name. "You figure it out," she says. But maybe if he would have spent more time trying to make a record rather than trying to... " She pauses, then adds, darkly, "He's got a bit of a reputation for trying to get with girls he makes records with.
"That's the point where I just broke down. My mom flew out and stayed with me for a while. It was really, really hard."
She remembers going crazy one night at one of the after hours parties she hosts at her home, bawling out a friend who was smoking a cigarette and then storming out of the house at 3 a.m., crying and slamming the door behind her. She ran and ran up the street. People came up to her while she was crying, and she simply told them to go away.
"I felt like I was nutty," she says. 'I didn't want anyone to get close to me. I had put an imaginary box around me. I would literally scoot away from a person. It was bad, bad, bad."

In the past two years, Aguilera has found herself suing the people she once trusted, and feeling betrated in her personal relationships. That's one reason for the new album's edginess.
Stripped was put together during those two turbulent years---Aguilera wrote almost all the lyrics with the succession of producers and cowriters, including sometime Eminem producer Scott Storch and Glen Ballard, who has produced Alanis Morissette and Dave Matthews. Other collaborators who made the final cut include Lil' Kim, Dave Navarro, and Alicia Keys.
The album veers from exuberant diva disco (the storch produced "Can't Hold Us Down") to the 70's guitar wig out "Make Over," a live-wire rant (featuring x-4 Non Blonde and Pink collaborator Linda Perry) against those in the business who tried to mold her image, to Perry'saching four chord ballad"Beautiful," the only song Aguilera didn't cowrite.
No matter who's manning the production console, thought he theme running through Stripped stays the same: Aguilera raising a middle finger at the people who she feels have mistreated her, manipulated her, betrayed her or dissed her.

B---We're impressed with the level of pure rage on Stripped. Do you ever have a problem managing your anger in public?
CA---"You know what? I've been taking kickboxing lessons. I've gotten to the place in a club where Im ready to go there. I don't think I'd be timid.

Stripped reached it's most heartfelt moment on "I'm OK," which she co wrote with Perry. It's not necessarily the CD's best song, but its the only one that gives the clearest insight into why Stripped is like it is. And why Aguilera is like she is.
"I'm OK" is about her father, Fausto Aguilera, an Equadorean American U.S. Army sergeant, the man to whom her mother gave her heart away too soon, as the lyric from "Infatuation" tells it. The song is also about the abuse he dealt out to her and her mother before they left him, when Christina was 5.
The song is guilelessly graphic, depicting Aguiler's life with her father on an army base in Japan. Scenes she had long forgotten surfaced in the writing: a memory of her father knocking her against a cold staircase: the sight of her mother with red bruises around her neck from where he had apparently half-throttled her. "You know," she sys, "Writing it was really, really hard."
Perry encouraged her to let all the memories spill out. As Aguilera sings you can hear her crying.
At one point during recording, she balked. "It's too much. I can't do it," she said through tears.
Perry, who hs become something of a guru to confessional female songwriters, cajoled Aguilera to finish recording: "It's a good place to be," she told her. "Just do it."
Aguilera isn't sure what her father will make of the song. In the past, he has publicly denied abusing his wife and daughter. 'But as I sing 'For you it's a memory, but for me...' " Aguilera says, grimacing, "you know---it's still there."
For years she has had little contact with her father. She say's shes not even sure he knows the song will be coming out. "He'll know pretty soon," she says, laughing abruptly.

B--- The way you sing "I'm OK," it sounds more like a question than an assertion.
CA-- "Absolutely. It sounds like it could be uplifting, but the real question is, 'Am I OK?' " Her mouth scrunches up for a second. "Obviously not, if I'm still freakin' crying about it.
*****

Wednesday nights frind Christina Aguilera at the Lounge, a club on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. There she sits in a booth surrounded by her regular entourage" young dancers, actors, a make up artist. She doesn't dance. She watches.
She sits in the middle of the bench in a position that makes it just about impossible for her to move, sipping her drink while people mill around her. One friend calls her Nurse Betty because of how she nurses a glass for two hours while ordering more for everyone else.
"I like everyone to have a good time," she protests.
Tonight,she is cradling a green drink in a tall glass. "What is it? I dont know."
"It's a Midori sour," a friend tells her.
"Oh."
She likes to drink, but only as much as the next person, she says. At the moment, shes into mojitos. When she met Alicia Keys at New Yorks Mercer Hotel to discuss their Stripped collaboration, the two singers christened their newfound relationship with them. With Perry, she drank tequila shots. Sometimes she likes a nice cold beer.
"I'm not a big drug person. I'm really not," she says. " I don't like being completely out of control in my situation. I like drinking. It takes the efge off."
Her friends have been scrawling on the linen tablecloth in front of her. Someone has written "you smell." A couple of inches away, others have been playing hangman: P E N I S.
Her fellow former Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake is holding court two booths away. He comes over to say hello, politely leaning over the table to talk to her. It's one of those very modern Hollywood moments. Dressed in a number 27 basketball jersey, J. Lo's ex-husband Chris Judd comes to pay his respects as well.
Aguilera sits, taking it all in, watching the crowd carefully, taking tiny sips from her Midori sour.

B-- Boyfriend rumors. One : Tobey Maguire.
CA-- "Ahh! Really?"

B-- Read it in the papers. It must be true
CA-- "Tobey's just one of the people I've gotten to know and be really cool with. That's funny."

B- Two: Robbie Williams
CA-- She shakes her head vigorously. "He's cool, but he never even says hi to me when we're working at the same studio!"

B-- Three: Dave Navarro
CA--"Oh, no! Him and Carmen [Electra]
--I'm not going to touch that." She bursts out laughing. "I'm a big fan of his. I've always respected him as a guitarist."

B-- What was thelast great party you attended?
CA--"I don't know. Here in L.A., damn--
I haven't been to a great party in a while."

B-- Is that for lack of trying?
CA-- "I don't think there have been really great parties. The last party I went to was Tobey's party. Which was pretty cool.

B-- That's Tobey Maguire, your lover?
CA-- She laughs. "According to the press ....schmess."

The Lounge crowd moves obediantly toward the exit. Aguilera hates that clubs close at 2.a.m. Shes never ready to go to bed by then. Often she invites her club friends, new and old, back to her place and stays awake until morning. She hates to be alone at night, yet it's the time she comes alive.
"It's a double-edged thing," she says. I'm afraid of the night, but I feel a comfort in it."
It's easy to understand why Aguiera tries so hard to get her audience to look at her, to see her as something other than the sweet, confident, beguiling girl who sang "Genie in a Bottle."
She never felt like that girl,she says. The real Christina was someone who was afraid of the dark, who remembered lying awake in her bedroom in the Tokyo apartment before her mother and father split.
"I was really afraid at the time," she remembers. "Growing up like that, you never know whats going to happen. Being afraid to go home."
Perhaps its no wonder she wants to destroy everything her first album represented, all with her raggedy hair extensions, her pin cushion piercings and her often deliberately unpretty sexuality.
With Stripped, she has achieved what she has set out to do.
"I like darker music---I don't really like happy music a lot," she concludes. "There's a comfort to me in pain."

Comments

[mamahooch.livejournal.com]

YES! This is-- okay, see, this is fantastic. I think the whole reason I couldn't stand her before was that the image and the music and just ALL of it was so patently fake that it was abundantly clear even she herself wasn't into it. I was frustrated by her early stuff, because there was this incredible talent buried in there somewhere, and the insipid music she was given drove me crazy - not because it wasn't cute and fun, but because I always thought she had something greater in her.

I'm definitely buying the new album. Thanks for posting the interview!

Re:

[cimness.livejournal.com]

:D yay! ::kiss:: no problem.