The Good, the Bad and the Dirrty

"Bring him over,” she says to her personal assistant as Blender arrives at the front door. She, incidentally, is naked on her bed except for a sheet clutched to her breast. “I want to say hello.”

It is a little after 10 o’clock on a misty Tuesday night in September, high in the Hollywood Hills. Christina Aguilera’s secluded home — opulent enough to suggest that her wealth is vast, her decorative taste eclectic and her love for scented candles boundless — is teeming with people on her payroll. The reason for tonight’s gathering may be a little bizarre for everyday folk to appreciate, but such is the life of an international superstar.

Yesterday, Blender’s Woman of the Year dyed her hair from one shade of brunette to another. Consequently, the world’s media want to see immediate photographic proof, so she has arranged for a photographer friend to record the evidence and then distribute it. Blender is led through the coterie of photographers, assistants, makeup artists, PRs, PAs and Aguilera’s two constantly yapping dogs, Stinky and Chewy (both aptly named), for a welcoming handshake that is firmer than you might expect. “I’ll be out in a little while,” she coos. “Make yourself at home. Go for a tour of the house — it’s a beautiful place.”

She is not wrong. Set at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac, with movie stars’ houses nearby, the Aguilera residence perfectly illustrates her career arc these past few years (her self-titled 1999 debut sold 8 million copies; her current album, Stripped, is 3 million high and rising). It is not huge, her place, but rather comfortably ample: three bedrooms, two living rooms, a kitchen, a basement screening room, a swimming pool, a waterfall. A framed photograph of two of her latest heroes, twentieth-century pop-art mavericks Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, adorns the wall. The lighting is set to ambient; the view from the garden — Los Angeles twinkling under the night sky — is cinematically seductive; and in the bathroom, the toilet paper is very soft.

“Nice, huh?” she says when she emerges from the bedroom a half-hour later. She is dressed — and we use that word loosely — in a small hooded dressing gown that stops a millimeter below her pubic bone. It reveals more flesh than it conceals, and every time she bends down to pick up her coffee cup, it falls open at the chest.

The first thing you notice about her in person is that she is prettier than photographs suggest. Up close, she looks less like Marilyn Manson and absolutely nothing like a porn queen. Mostly, she seems delicate, vulnerable and tiny. Her hands and feet are doll-like, her body slight. Later, when she boasts that she is proud of her womanly curves — as if, when she looks down, she sees Jennifer Lopez — your reaction is: What curves? God alone knows where that enormous voice comes from. More than anything else, she looks young. But the 22-year-old, candid and flamboyantly outspoken, sure talks like a grownup.

“Before this year, I suffered in life. I’d been burned and hurt a hell of a lot, repeatedly. This was the year I finally grew into myself and became an adult. Stripped was all about me taking the reins and assuming full control of my career. I’m not an entertainer anymore. I am,” she says, and here she pauses while she reaches for her coffee, allowing the pause to become pregnant with expectation, “an artist.” She says all this while maintaining full eye contact that defies you to disbelieve her. Not once does she blink.


The story of Christina Aguilera’s remarkable success is a story of resolve over adversity, talent over self-doubt and assless chaps over bare midriff.

Like Pink, Aguilera comes from a broken home, and to this day she carries the mental and physical scars of a violent father. A military man, Fausto Aguilera was posted all over the world, and for the first five years of his daughter’s life, the family was stationed in Tokyo. The singer’s sole memories of Japan are unpleasant ones: Dad beating Mom and, occasionally, beating her as well. Things got so bad that her mother took to sleeping with a canister of Mace under her pillow to use as protection. Whenever another fight began, young Christina would hide in her room and sing to her stuffed animals to drown out the shouts and screams.

“It’s just the way I coped,” she says. “I would hide under the bed, just singing and thinking to myself, ‘One day, I’m going to get out of this and become a famous singer.’ ”

By the time she turned 6, her mother had filed for divorce and returned, with Christina and her younger sister, to the United States, settling in Pittsburgh. At age 12, Christina was a Mouseketeer alongside Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. Five years later, with a modern pop classic — “Genie in a Bottle” — under her belt, she had fulfilled those early dreams.

“You’d think I’d be happy, right?” she says, the accompanying frown suggesting otherwise. “But I was playing a part dictated by my then manager and my record company. I hated who I was back then, and I knew if I was going to continue in this business, I had to do things for myself next time. Stripped had to be a truly experimental record and a true representation of me. I didn’t care if I sold one or 1 million copies. It just had to be real.”

Stripped is indeed real. It’s also a stark, sometimes shocking, contrast to the pastel palette of her debut. It’s an album of battle scars (“Fighter,” about the father she has rarely seen since Tokyo; “Walk Away,” about her ex-boyfriend Jorge Santos) and defiant self-belief (“Keep on Singin’ My Song” and the lush “Beautiful,” which goes, “I am beautiful no matter what they say/Words can’t bring me down/So don’t you bring me down today”).

Tellingly, she enlisted the talents of former 4 Non Blonde frontwoman Linda Perry to help stage this radical reinvention, just as Pink had for the 5 million– selling M!ssundaztood. The musical bedrock of Stripped is not teen-pop but soul, gospel, rap and rock, highlighting not just Aguilera’s independent spirit but a vocal style Whitney Houston would applaud. Much of it is radio-friendly, but, at her insistence, its first single was “Dirrty,” the raucous duet/clash with hip-hop’s Redman, a song that would subsequently terrify radio. Further obliterating her PG-13 image was the video: a David LaChappelle–directed clip that featured Aguilera hosting a post-apocalyptic orgy. On the guest list? Sexually-up-to-the-minute plushies and furries and bare asses (oh, my!). The result was shock and outrage from a moral America that wondered where exactly the prom queen who emerged in 1999 had gone.

“I love ‘Dirrty,’ ” she says with fierce pride. “It’s a great song, even more so because it came from the girl who sang ‘Genie in a Bottle.’ I like to shock — I think it’s inspiring. I love to play and experiment, to be as tame or as outlandish as I happen to feel on any given day.”

The single’s commercial failure, she insists, bothered her little.

“When you are bold and open, artistically speaking, in music and in video, a whole bunch of people automatically feel threatened by you, especially in Middle America. That’s just the way it goes. OK, I may have been the naked-ass girl in the video, but if you look at it carefully, I’m also at the forefront. I’m not just some lame chick in a rap video; I’m in the power position, in complete command of everything and everybody around me. To be totally balls-out like that is, for me, the measure of a true artist.”

Make no mistake about this: Christina Aguilera sees herself as much more than a mere pop star. She’ll impress this upon you at length, comparing herself to a range of artists whose careers, shall we say, have little in common with the former Mouseketeer’s at first glance.

“Look at Van Gogh,” she says. “He couldn’t sell a painting to save his life while he was alive. The poor guy had to give them away. Same with Basquiat. They used to call him ‘Basket Case.’ Really! But if that’s what it takes to be a true artist, then I’m prepared to suffer.”

Critical opprobrium toward “Dirrty” was widespread. Many of Aguilera’s fellow artists, from Shakira to Jessica Simpson, considered her new image a step too far; Kelly Osbourne rarely missed an opportunity to bitch about her in public; and Saturday Night Live mocked the R-rated, heavily pierced, newly christened Xtina with voracious glee.

“Of course the criticism hurt. I’m only human, after all,” she says, a little testily. “I thought the SNL sketch was pretty lame, actually. I could have made a funnier script out of it. But who cares? Being in this position is all about rolling with the punches, and believe me, I can roll with the punches.”

No one, she says, is bold the way she is bold.

“Look at people like Beyoncé or Britney. They’re desperate to come across as sweet, good little girls, but then you see them in photo shoots that are extremely sexual — tight little booty shorts, and not much else. So why do they try to be virginal in interviews?” She holds a finger to her mouth, Lolita-like, and affects a note-perfect Spears impersonation. “ ‘Oh, gosh, I haven’t even kissed a boy in I don’t know how long!’ ”

The finger drops away, and her top lip curls into an Elvis sneer. “Come on, girls, stop contradicting yourselves! If you want to do those magazine covers and those videos, then fine, more power to you. But don’t revert to innocence afterward.” She shakes her head. “I will not hide behind anything, ever. I’m a sexually strong female, and I’m proud to be one. If anyone has a problem with that, tough.”

Nevertheless, the Xtina backlash did induce a certain amount of panic — if not in Aguilera herself, then certainly in her record company and management, who quickly hired the famously protective powerhouse PR firm PMK to help right the ship. Gone were the leather and handcuffs; in came a sweeter, more serene Christina. Her next single was the ballad “Beautiful.” The result was a resounding success: a number 1 hit, relief all around.

Aguilera, however, strongly denies any suggestion of an about-face.

“ ‘Beautiful’ was always scheduled as the second single, because I thought it was a perfect contrast to ‘Dirrty,’ ” she says. “It’s a very vulnerable song, and I wanted to show that side of me. To suggest that it was rush-released to rescue my career . . . well, that’s bullshit.” She glowers. “Bullshit.”


Christina Aguilera has a favorite word right now, one she employs with the frequency of an addict: edgy. It pops up in many of her conversations, sometimes with purpose, other times at will. She describes herself, for example, as an “edgy” artist, and she admires the “edgy” acting of Angelina Jolie. The reason she responded to Madonna’s last-minute invitation to appear alongside her and nemesis Britney Spears at MTV’s Video Music Awards back in August, meanwhile, was because it sounded — you guessed it — edgy. It turns out, however, that in the end the performance didn’t quite live up to Aguilera’s high expectations.

“The VMAs were so . . . so vanilla,” she says. “So safe, so predictable, no edge. Apart from Madonna, Mary J. Blige and myself, I cannot think of another female performer who had her mic switched on. That is very disappointing to me. I agreed to do it in the first place only because Madonna had told me that it was mandatory to sing live.”

Something palpable happens to Aguilera when she talks about Spears. She loses eye contact, focuses on her cuticles and grows visibly uncomfortable, as if wary of saying too much. But her dissatisfaction clearly needs a voice, and she duly gives it one. She suggests that although Spears sang live during rehearsals, when the show went on the air, she was lip-syncing.

“Who knows what happened, exactly,” Aguilera says, sighing. “She was supposed to, but somewhere along the line. . . . I don’t know. Maybe some money changed hands under the table? . . . ” She trails off awkwardly, then changes tack. “I’d much rather just wash my hands of the whole nonsense, actually. These people aren’t artists, they’re just performers — fake and superficial, like the entire event. I’m very disappointed with MTV. Just look at the way they handled the kiss.”

What she’s referring to, of course, is the kiss. Mid-song, Madonna swapped saliva with both singers, diving into both mouths tongue-first. The following day, however, it was her smacker with Spears that made the front pages. Aguilera’s barely got a mention.

“MTV didn’t even screen my kiss properly — they cut away instead for Justin [Timberlake’s] reaction shot. How predictable — let’s see the ex-boyfriend’s response. Pathetic.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Spears and Aguilera’s lips never came into contact.

“Actually, I was up for kissing Britney,” Aguilera says, “but Britney wasn’t. She was . . . she seemed very distant, even during rehearsals. Every time I tried to start a conversation with her — well, let’s just say she seemed nervous the whole time. I wanted to reach out to her, because I feel she needs somebody in her life right now to help guide her.”

And Aguilera — the woman who has just spent the summer on a joint tour with Timberlake — is ideal for the job?

“Well, I feel I’ve grown a lot this year, and we did used to be friends once, after all. She seems to me like a lost little girl, someone who desperately needs guidance. But who knows — maybe I’m not the right person to offer it. We’re very different people, aren’t we? In our world, there are different types of entertainers. You have your artists and you have your regular performers. I’m an artist, and, well. . . . ”

As another sentence about Spears goes unfinished, she permits herself a private smile. Later, she will complain about the press insistently keeping the apparent rivalry alive, as if she herself plays no part in it. But she often seems to fan the flames.

Recently, Aguilera has done some modeling, first for her good friend Donatella Versace and now for Skechers, the same brand of sneakers Spears promoted two years ago. Presumably this is a coincidence?

“Absolutely!” she insists. “I don’t do things based on what she does or doesn’t do, you know. And anyway, she did some kind of roller-skating thing for them. I’m not planning on doing any of that kind of shit.”

Instead, her ad campaign will have, she says firmly, “much more edge to it.”


Let us now leave the thorny subject of Britney Spears and move instead to happier topics. After the slow mending of her heart, broken last year by the aforementioned Jorge Santos, Aguilera is in love again, this time with a 25-year-old music management-company employee named Jordan Bratman. Reluctant to discuss any particular aspect of their life together, all she will say is that they are happy — very happy.

“He has an amazing spirit, and he is everything I need in my life right now. With him, my life is perfect.” She smiles openly, and in doing so she resembles the girl she once was.

Her current satisfaction may have been hard-won, but it is undeniably deserved. In the past 12 months, Christina Aguilera has completed the most startling pop reinvention since Madonna’s. That fact in itself is worthy of celebration, and so is this: Finally, her life has achieved some sort of peace.

“Things are good right now,” she says, “and I have no regrets about anything in my life — even the stuff I went through with my father, because in many ways it made me who I am today.” Her father recently wrote to her, congratulating her on her success and confessing to feelings of paternal pride. His daughter appreciated the sentiment, but she rules out any chance of a reunion.

“My father is really close to his brother, my uncle, who is basically this slimy scumbag who keeps trying to sell stories to the tabloids.” Her face becomes rigid. “I’ve suffered too much hurt in my life to go back to that place again,” she says. “I’m through being a victim.”