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"DIRRTY GIRL" set to ROCK New Zealand


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She's gone from Mouseketeer to 'dirrty girl' and now happily married glamour queen. Grant Smithies finds Christina Aguilera is never quite what you'd expect...

American pop singer Christina Aguilera and I have very little in common. She is globally famous, petite, beautiful, and, with a net worth of $US60 million ($82m), richer than many small countries. She can sing, too, of course, and dance. I am chubby, frequently broke, and sing like a freshly neutered cat.

We come from entirely different worlds, Christina and me, but one sad fact unites us: we both grew up with violent fathers. In a little house in Wanganui, mine would occasionally punch me, kick me and throw me against walls. And in Staten Island, New York, US Army Sergeant Fausto Aguilera, an Ecuadorian immigrant, would beat his wife Shelly and terrorise his daughters Christina and younger sister Rachel. When Christina was seven, her mother left her father and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

One of Aguilera's ways of dealing with her childhood trauma is to write songs about it, which is why we find dark lines such as "bruises fade, father, but the pain remains the same" and "he took his anger out on her face" drifting like storm clouds across the sunny skies of the world's pop charts.

Aguilera performs in New Zealand for the first time in July, and while on stage, she'll be having a few words to say about domestic violence.

"The more people who talk about violence against women and children, the better," says Aguilera from her Los Angeles office.

"Your situation and mine are very common, unfortunately, and the kind of thing that happened to us shouldn't happen to anyone. In my lyrics, I've been as personal as I can about the subject. I also fund women's shelters, and have done public service announcements spreading the word about violence against women, which get aired before all my shows. And the video backdrop for my song `Oh, Mother' is probably the darkest point of the concert. But I think it's really important to be as honest as you possibly can. I do it in part because it's therapeutic for me, but also because it's such a hush-hush subject. I hope people out there who are maybe going through something similar and feeling they're alone can get some strength from it."

I've always found Aguilera's records to be fairly bloated affairs, with a scattering of killer pop songs adrift in a sea of saccharine ballads and generic R'n'B, but talking to her today, I'm surprised to find myself liking her. She is unexpectedly friendly, admirably blunt, and talks like a woman who mainlines coffee. Her sentences burst out like air from a punctured tyre. You sense that a full stop, or at the very least a comma, is imminent, and then crash in with the next question. She is casually egotistical, like most child stars, but underneath she seems disarmingly sweet.

Born on December 18, 1980, Aguilera grew up listening to Nina Simone, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and Madonna, and would sing "all the time", often building makeshift stages in her grandma's house and using her mother's old cheerleading baton as her microphone. By the age of 10 she had graduated to TV talent shows, and in 1993 joined TV variety show The New Mickey Mouse Club, which at that time was a hothouse for young talent: her co-stars included Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and fellow 'N Sync member JC Casez, actor Ryan Gosling and En Vogue singer Rhona Bennett.

Aguilera and Spears, later arch rivals in the pop charts, were close back then, she says, "the two little girls of The Mickey Mouse Club".

Her debut album Christine Aguilera arrived in 1999, and singles "Genie In A Bottle" and "What A Girl Wants" were huge around the world. Latin pop album Mi Reflejo and a cash-in Christmas album followed, then came a change in management and with it, a major change in image.

In 2001, Aguilera morphed from sweet schoolgirl to lust-addled lingerie model. First she appeared as a high- class hooker in the video for "Lady Marmalade", the lead single from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, and then her 2002 album Stripped was launched with the single "Dirrty", a song whose video contained so much overheated bumping and grinding it had middle America choking on its cupcakes.

"There was a backlash against me for a while after that, for sure, but I'm proud of "Dirrty". It was an important song. It really showed how much still has to change about people's views about female sexuality. I think women should be supporting each other to feel empowered, not making each other feel ashamed. If you watch that video, you'll see I wasn't being disrespected in any way by a man. If anything, I was in the power position. I look back at that video and I think - wow - I put myself out there. You look at that video now and you'll see, I really had some balls!"

As instructed, I later watch the "Dirrty" video on YouTube. It's a riot of knicker-flashing, leg-humping, orgiastic action, and right up front there's Christina in a striped bikini top, a tiny pair of red panties with an "X" on the arse, some leather cowboy chaps and high heels. The plot? A cage is lowered into a boxing ring, Christina bursts out and proceeds to shake and bounce her little chassis like a car with bad suspension on a bumpy road. Then she's in a teensy mini skirt and white G-string, punching a woman in a wrestling mask. Next the action moves to a flooded parking building, and a party of hot shirtless men arrive. I watched closely, but even on freeze frame, I could see no sign of the balls she speaks of.

"It would be sad if people judged my career solely on `Dirrty'," continues Aguilera. "I was just making a point that, as women, it's important to feel free enough to express yourself as a sexual being."

Fair enough, but in the two years after she made the "Dirrty" video, Aguilera probably expressed herself as a sexual being a little too often. In fact, the girl seemed so oversexed, you wished someone would give her a cold shower. She cropped up naked in photo spreads for Maxim, CosmoGirl, GQ and Rolling Stone; she pashed Madonna at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards; she gave interviews where she was reported as saying she loved casual sex with both boys and girls, that she masturbated before live shows to ease the tension, and that she was so comfortable with her body that she'd pee into a bucket backstage, stark naked in front of a room full of people, during costume changes. Like Kylie and Madonna before her, Aguilera tried so hard to be a turn-on that she became a turn-off.

After her marriage to marketing executive Jordan Bratman late in 2005, the time seemed ripe for another image overhaul, this time into a pocket-sized cross between Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe. Such glamorous "mature artist" makeovers are common when pop stars hit their late 20s, presumably because it helps attract older fans to replace the fickle teenies who have moved on to more fashionable young singers.

"My last record has a more mature sound, certainly. It's a homage to all the jazz, blues and soul singers I loved from the 20s, 30s and 40s. That generation of performers conquered the entertainment world during a time when you made records live in the studio and you had to move people with just the sound of your voice. It wasn't about image or elaborate videos or expensive marketing campaigns. It was all about the voice."

Aguilera, too, is all about the voice. Get past her tendency to over- embellish, never using one note when 20 will do, and there's no denying she has some serious pipes. While vocally inferior pop stars such as Madonna, Britney, Kylie or Jessica Simpson disguise their thin voices and puny ranges with cunning backing harmonies and pitch-shifting technology, Aguilera is blessed with a full- bodied four-octave range.

Sadly, she doesn't always put this miraculous voice in the service of decent songs.

Last year's Back To Basics double album is riddled with throwaway tracks, but at least some of them are unintentionally very funny: "Here To Stay" attempts to open a can of whoop- ass on all those critics who dismissed her as a "ho" a few years earlier, "Still Dirrty" informs us that Aguilera still enjoys shagging despite her newly demure appearance, "The Right Man" implies all her former lovers were merely the bumpy foothills she had to trudge through on the long climb towards the manly pinnacle that is her current husband, and the truly unbearable "Thank You" splices together voicemail messages from obsessive fans telling Christina how her beautiful music has saved them from depression and even suicide.

Amid all this filler, however, there's enough smart and sassy modern pop to suggest that her upcoming gig in Auckland could be a pearler.

"Believe me, this is the most inspired and theatrical show I've ever done" she says.

"There's three different stage set- ups, including a juke joint and a 1930s circus, with trapeze-swinging, fire- throwing, stilt-walking, 25 people on stage, and a lot of costume changes. I play a bunch of roles in this one."

Of course, Aguilera has been playing "a bunch of roles" in the public eye for most of her life: painfully cute Mouseketeer, curious virgin schoolgirl, high-end hooker, sexually aggressive nympho, happily married glamour queen. But what's she really like?

"I'd say I was passionate and creative, someone who stands up for what she believes in, someone who's pretty bold. I don't know - what would you guys say?" Behind her a herd of record company publicists, tour managers and stylists chime in with a chorus of "yeah", "for sure" and "no doubt". Which, endearingly, makes her giggle. "See, they agree."

Yes, but they have to. Nobody on your payroll is going to stand up and say - actually, I think Christina Aguilera is a bitch.

"No, that's true," she says. "But really, I don't think I am. I don't have tantrums. I'm assertive, and direct, but I never give people a hard time for no reason. I grew up with that happening to me. I know how it feels, so I'm not about to start doing it to anyone else."

source:reuters

image:reuters:STOP THE VIOLENCE...Pop singer CHRISTINA AGUILERA will use her upcoming New Zealand concert to spread the anti-domestic violence message.

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