As Christina Aguilera performed her song “Still Dirrty,” Friday night at Madison Square Garden, fake newspaper headlines flashed on the video screen behind her: “Christina Has Gone From ‘Dirrty’ to ‘Demure’,” “Christina: From Nasty to Chastity,” and so on.
Aguilera, who became a star during the teen-pop craze of the late ’90s, was, in part, mocking the media’s reaction to her last two albums, 2002’s “Stripped” and last year’s “Back To Basics.” The former took some fans by surprise with its brazen sexual references, and the skin-baring music videos Aguilera released for its singles. The latter’s singles and videos have been tamer and, musically, the album has a retro flavor, with touches of jazz and blues added to Aguilera’s prior blend of pop, rock and hip-hop.
Critics have noticed the difference, though I doubt anyone has been crass enough to write she’s gone “from nasty to chastity.” It’s not that big a deal, anyway, since “Stripped” mixed introspective, dignified songs with the racier stuff, and “Back to Basics” has some provocative double entendres of its own.
Aguilera, 26, made the point herself on “Still Dirrty,” a sequel to the “Back to Basics” hit, “Dirrty.” “I still got the nasty in me,” she sang.
The purposely ridiculous headlines — which, in the Madonna tradition, playfully commented on the performer’s self-created mythology — were intended to make the same point. Aguilera is both demure and dirrty, and don’t you forget it.
She’s lots of other things, too. She’s one of the strongest-voiced young pop stars around, with no need, or inclination, to lip-sync in concert. And she’s comfortable in her divadom: She embraces it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Numbers like “Ain’t No Other Man,” the show’s crisp opener, and “Hurt,” its most deeply emotional ballad, represented arena-pop at its undeniable best.
Still, the show’s artistic contradictions were endless, and sometimes jarring. Aguilera — who also has upcoming shows in Atlantic City and the Meadowlands — adopted a new musical style about as often as she changed clothes or made a major adjustment to her outfit. Basically, this means every song or two. Her vision was broad enough to include both gospel exhortations, during “Makes Me Wanna Pray,” and S&M props during “Nasty Naughty Boy” (where a male volunteer was selected from the audience, tied down, and teased). The first of her two encores was the gentle, uplifting “Beautiful”; the second was her hardest-driving rock song, “Fighter.”
During “Back in the Day,” she projected images of the artists she mentions as role models in the song (Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Marvin Gaye) on video screens. In a video interlude that was built around “I Got Trouble,” and meant to evoke the feel of an old silent movie, she showed herself lounging around in skimpy outfits, as if lost in a substance-fueled haze.
She followed “Oh Mother,” a sincere tribute to her mother — and the strength she had to leave an abusive relationship with Aguilera’s father — with a changeover to a circus set. Her dancers walked on stilts and breathed fire, and she sang the circus-themed “Welcome.”
Clearly ambivalent about her teen-pop roots, she didn’t perform her first hit, “Genie in a Bottle.” And she reworked her second hit, “What a Girl Wants,” so thoroughly it was almost unrecognizable; a lumbering beat destroyed the song’s essential lightness.
There was one moment that seemed right out of the teen-pop manual, though. During the break before the encores, she played taped video messages from fans along the lines of, “You have the sexiest voice on the planet.” (This was basically a video version of the disconcertingly congratulatory “Back to Basics” track, “Thank You.”)
Maybe someday Aguilera will put together a more cohesive, more consistently tasteful show. But maybe not. She’s gone far with her sometimes dirrty, sometimes demure act, and likely sees no need to stop. Unless, of course, she wants to follow the example of her “Back to Basics” idols in a more genuine way.
July 4th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Saw Christina in Hong Kong last night. Energetic, enthusiastic dancers, a very professional, tight band, good back up singers and a well rehearsed performance don’t add up to anything in this basically one note, one volume of posing on stage in style-less costumes excuse for a concert. Maybe she is a true American cultural icon: professional, enegetic, loud and brash lacking any subtance or originality, but couched in pseudo sexuality. Perhaps someone close to Christina should explain to her that back to basics usually means dropping the “act” and just singing. Oh well, that probably wouldn’t make her the millions that this tour and CD will undoubtedly bring her from her legions of lemmings.