| Rolling Stone's
Cover Story, November 2002
Has Anyone Seen Christina?
Inside the dirty mind of a pop princess
By Chris
It was late one night in Miami, toward the end of
last year, that Christina Aguilera discovered the therapeutic joy of smashing
things. She had recently split up with her boyfriend, Jorge Santos --
one of the dancers in her live show, and her first true love -- and she
wasn't happy. She had taken her rage and sorrow out to a nightclub and,
now that she was there, she didn't quite know what to do with them. "I
was in a weird head space," she recalls. "I was not myself,
for sure. I was kind of running around, crazy, experiencing things for
the first time." A friend of hers, diagnosing her dilemma, led her
away, into one of the club's back rooms, where he handed her a champagne
glass.
"Break this," he told her.
"What?" she responded.
"Throw it," he instructed, taking a glass
and hurling it against the wall, by way of demonstration.
So she did the same. And, as it shattered, something
within her was quelled.
"That was the first time I had really broken
things," she says, "and it felt so good."
That night, they smashed about two boxes of champagne
glasses. Afterward, she felt "fucking great."
Aguilera has hardly been cleansed of anger since
that day, nor is she such an unconflicted soul that she is unable to conjure
up plenty of other feelings (bitterness, paranoia, insecurity, a desperate
need for approval) without which life is simpler and cleaner, but maybe
she's learning how to deal with it all. The recording of her new album,
Stripped, was not a simple, steady or speedy process, and there were difficult
times along the way. On one particular day, she found herself feeling
increasingly irritated, and her irritation wouldn't subside. She had learned
various ways of relieving stress in the studio: chucking tea bags against
the studio walls, for instance, or pretending that she was a horror-movie
actress going crazy. The songwriter Linda Perry, who collaborated on four
of Stripped's songs, suggested Aguilera simply scream at the top of her
lungs. But sometimes none of these was enough. Now she knew another way.
She asked a runner to go shopping for her and to bring back lots of glasses
and lots of dishes. She'd do the rest.
Today, there is a meeting to be held in the Los
Angeles haze, in the twentieth-floor offices of Aguilera's manager, Irving
Azoff, to choose pictures for her CD sleeve. She is late, but then, as
far as I can work out, she is always late. (Eventually I will ask her
about this, and she will look surprised at the question, then laugh, then
say, "Oh, boy, that's probably my worst quality," though she
will then temper this by explaining that it's just that she often wakes
up late and that she's always relying on other people for transport because,
though she has a driver's license, she doesn't like to drive in Los Angeles,
and she's scared of "lawsuits and things" if she does, and.
. . . ) After an hour and a half, she arrives. The photos under consideration
for Stripped's front cover show her topless, her hair extensions flailing
in front of her breasts just enough for decency. She studies some shots.
She puts one hand on one picture, covering the face; with the other hand,
she covers the picture from the waist down. "My stomach looks good
in that one," she says.
"It's just so curvy."
The designer, Jeri, argues against a close-up Aguilera
likes. "It makes your head look too small," she says.
"I like the expression on that," counters
Aguilera. "It makes me look a little tormented, like I'm thinking
about something."
Aguilera rejects a shot Jeri favors. "I don't
think it looks like me," she says. "It looks like I'm an opera
singer or something."
"It is very pretty," comments Jeri evenly.
"Yeah," says Aguilera. "I don't like
pretty. Fuck the pretty."
As most people have already noticed, the Christina
Aguilera who appeared in 1999 singing "Genie in a Bottle" --
the one presented as the latest shiny-eyed, blond-haired, innocently flirty,
nicely behaved, demurely and deniably coquettish teen-pop songstress --
no longer exists.
On the day we first talk -- when, she says, she
is "dressing down" -- her hair is partly covered by a do-rag,
with a Pony baseball cap perched on it, and she is wearing a pink pajama
top with the word gotcha on it, and a pair of combat pants hanging open
several inches at the front to reveal much of her underwear, which says
skimpies onit. ("It's not, like, a thong," she comments. "This
is boys' underwear -- it's comfortable shit.") On her left arm, just
above the elbow, she is wearing an armband thatsays 69. ("I think
it's just funny," she says.) "I don't wear long floral skirts
down to my ankles," she says. "This is just me, I guess."
Recently, her clothing choices have been
much remarked upon. Columnist Liz Smith has averred that both she and
Britney Spears had come to August's MTV Video Music Awards in "hooker
get-ups."
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