Christina Aguilera has had the decorators in. Her Los Angeles mansion has been overhauled in a project nicknamed Project Pop Royalty.
According to the precise specifications of Aguilera and her husband, Jordan Bratman (a music business management executive), the myriad rooms are now a rhapsody in pink and red. Thirty chandeliers have been hung, a pinball-stuffed games room created. The LA interior design company Woodson & Rummerfield spent more than four months working on a nursery for their first child, Max, now two. The centrepiece is an 11ft-tall moon used as a prop on her last world tour, in support of her 2006 album Back to Basics. Her other favourite room is the studio in the back garden, beyond the mini-lake and waterfall, where she wrote and recorded much of her new album, Bionic.
"I can just put on my flip-flops and sweatpants and go right back," she beams. "We call it the Red Lip Room." There was some work to do on the house as the previous owners had left their mark all over the place. They were Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, and this was the house made famous in their reality TV show, The Osbournes.
"We kept certain elements, because there was also a homage-paying factor that was really fun," Aguilera, 29, says in the bright, shiny way that speaks of half a lifetime in the spotlight.
Aguilera has come a long way, fast. Her adolescent days on The Mickey Mouse Club alongside Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears led her straight into the pop charts: her debut single, Genie in a Bottle, released when she was 18, was an international hit. Her self-titled 1999 debut album sold 17 million copies.
But the bubblegum image foisted on her, lucrative though it was, frustrated the teenager with the octave-vaulting voice that could hit a high 'E'. Her 2002 album, Stripped, showcased her raunchier side. The infamous video, released the same year for her single Dirrty, directed by the outlandish photographer David LaChapelle, revealed an Aguilera thrusting ahead – in every sense – in revealing leather chaps and braided blond hair extensions. She took the makeover further: she was now 'Xtina', a sexually provocative woman with an edge, and she had the newly acquired multiple body piercings to prove it. Most of the piercings have gone, she tells me when we meet in a Beverly Hills hotel room. Doll-like petite, and with her white-blond hair perfectly coiffed and her lips a bright shade of scarlet, she wears a huge silver knuckle-duster across her right hand saying 'Xtina'. She is dressed in a plunging bustier.
The rebrand paid off: Aguilera became one of the most successful artists of the past decade, selling 43 million records and winning five Grammys. Her signature ballad, the soaring Beautiful, added some critical credibility to the mix too. She
changed course again with Back to Basics, in which she dressed like a 1940s blond bombshell. And where the career of her rival, Britney Spears, spun out in a haze of drugs and paparazzi run-ins, Aguilera ploughed a steadier, more lucrative path. She recently completed work on her debut film role in Burlesque.
Christina Aguilera is back, and marriage, mansions and motherhood and have not dulled her edge. The sleeve image (and title) of Bionic reflects the album's embracing of electronic and dancefloor sounds: half of Aguilera's face is replaced by robot circuitry. Sonically, too, she 'reached out' to underground electronic artists such as Ladytron and Peaches. There are gentler ballads, a couple written with the hitmaker Linda Perry (who wrote Beautiful) and some with the Australian singer-songwriter Sia. But the feel of Bionic, not least in the fizzy robo-disco lead single, Not Myself Tonight, is one of full-on club grooves. New mum, then, didn't turn soft.
"Definitely not," she shoots back, then talks at me – rapidly – for some time. "Being a mum and being an artist that expresses myself are two very different things for me, they're two very different hats that I wear. Do I lessen anything because
I'm either married or have a child? No. Because it's all about self-expression and being an artist. It's so important to me. I'm not just a singer. I'm an artist who gets visually inspired and collects art."
The idea to make an electronic record came early on. Or, as she puts it, "I always knew I wanted to do a futuristic statement on a musical note. But I wanted to make sure I did my inspiration record first."
She's talking about Back to Basics. One half of that double-album featured Candyman and Ain't No Other Man, singles that evoked the Andrews Sisters and jumpin' jazz. Some critics scoffed at this latest sharp left-turn. But it was, she insists in
a breathless, grammar-flouting rush, "a retro exploring of my inspirations musically to begin with when I was six years old with the soul and the blues and the jazz artists and exploring what that was visually in the 1920s and 30s and 40s." It was about "paying homage to the people that inspired me", a process "that almost forced me to revisit times in my childhood that I probably didn't want to".
Christina Aguilera was born in Staten Island in 1980, the first child of Fausto Aguilera, a US army sergeant from Ecuador, and his Irish-American wife, Shelly. Her parents divorced when Aguilera was six, and she, her mother and younger sister moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It had been a difficult family environment: money was short, army postings took them around the US and further afield (including a spell in Japan), and her father was physically violent towards her mother. Long estranged from her father, she sang about these times on the Back to Basics songs Oh Mother ('he took his anger out on her face') and The Right Man ('no father stands beside me to give this bride away').
Old-school music was a refuge for Aguilera. "Soul and blues spoke to me at an age where many would think I was too young to appreciate it. Six years old and I was listening to Billie Holiday as if it was the world to me. I related to blues and soul because I never had a safe haven growing up. It was a very chaotic environment for me to grow up in."
And that music was born of pain. So it was her comfort blanket?
"Yes, absolutely."
Aguilera's love of music quickly became a love of performing. Her astonishing voice brought her acclaim on the local talent-show circuit. She was ambitious, and determined to succeed. Does she think her troubled home life, for all the pain, inculcated independence and self-sufficiency early on?
"It had to," she says firmly. "Probably growing up witnessing my mum being so helpless at my father's hands and under my father's control and not having a career of her own to fall back on…" she says, the words tumbling out of her. "Watching that and witnessing how helpless she was in the situation and having to rely on a man – that was something I definitely absorbed early on into realising this is not who I want to be. This is a situation that I never want find myself in.
"And I was very defiant against it. It created a lot of anger for me. Any time I felt an injustice, or bullying – I was very sensitive to that. I don't like bullies. And I never, ever wanted to feel helpless to a man. So I was driven from a really early age to… succeed on my own. Yeah," she nods, "to succeed on my own. For myself. And make it."
(Reuters) - Grammy-award winning singer Christina Aguilera was named an ambassador against hunger on Friday by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), and said that having a child of her own had pushed her into action.
Entertainment | People
"A child dies every 6 seconds of hunger, which is a huge statistic for me," Aguilera told Oprah Winfrey, announcing her appointment on Winfrey's popular TV talk show.
"After having my own child, I just had to be a part of it and do something about it and help change that situation," she said.
Aguilera, 29, whose hit songs include "Beautiful" and "Genie in a Bottle", has a two-year-old son with her music executive husband Jordan Bratman.
Last year, she traveled to Guatemala to see WFP's programs for maternal and child health programs, and in January she took part in the "Hope for Haiti" celebrity telethon that raised more than $60 million for earthquake disaster relief.
Aguilera described her work with WFP as a life-changing experience and said she plans to go to Haiti soon: "I want to check on the situation there and help to deliver food. I want to visit orphanages and schools there and try to do my part in helping."
Josette Sheeran, executive director of WFP, said Aguilera had a passion and dedication to hungry children that "will make her a wonderful champion in the fight against hunger.
I just finished reading that article. That was great! I love how she plans on working for decades to come. :clap3;
From the article:
Quote:
The look for that tour, she says, will involve a lot of latex. "It just fits the body so well," she coos, "and it's very simple. And it's very graphic-looking on camera and film. So that ended up being a lot of my go-to choices for this record. It's very slick, it shines. You can lubricate it up."
It is so creepy that I straight up said Christina's theme for Bionic should be latex. I said she should do that back in October. Look at the thread I created on LiveDaily.
I just finished reading that article. That was great! I love how she plans on working for decades to come. :clap3;
From the article:
It is so creepy that I straight up said Christina's theme for Bionic should be latex. I said she should do that back in October. Look at the thread I created on LiveDaily.
It's definitely time for the 2nd single!