At Prince’s party, all Earth-based reality is negotiable. And there, moving smoothly behind the crowd-parting prow of an all-business bodyguard, is a petite, platinum-blond synthesis of the whole retro-futurist, glam-louche, New-Old-Hollywood spectacle: Christina Aguilera.
In recent years, Aguilera’s look has been changeable to near unrecognizability: from blond to raven-haired to redheaded, coquettish to slutty to whatever it is you are when you’re in a soul-kissing-Madonna sandwich with Britney Spears. But however you described her, words like elegant and classic probably went unmolested. Not tonight. Though she’s club-casual in white V-neck cashmere hoodie, dark jeans, and leopard-print high heels, Aguilera’s spit-curl coif, bright red Kewpie doll lips, and sparkling ruby barrette suggest an R&B Jean Harlow. This is Aguilera 3.0: a Jazz Age Broadway-baby songbird. And from the looks of things—let’s see if I get this right—girlfriend is working it. “I really try to live out whatever I’m doing with the music in my life,” says the formidably self-assured 25-year-old. “Like now, even when I’m only going to be in the studio, I never go without bright red lipstick.”
Aguilera’s new album, Back to Basics, due to drop in a couple of months, blends a vintage-soul sound with state-of-the-art beatsmanship to form a throwback/hip-hop showcase for her outsize voice. Interweaving a Weimar-cabaret theme, it is decidedly a concept album. “In the end, it’s really cool to just follow a set vision,” she says. “I think it makes for a better product.” And the vision is a bold one, if not in ways previously associated with the buttless-chaps-clad provocateur.
To promote the album, Aguilera is planning a tour of jazz clubs, including the blue-chip Blue Note, a New York institution. Hearing this news, some may imagine the ghost of Ella Fitzgerald scatting foul oaths in the wind, but it’s also kind of awesome. Imagine for one second Aguilera’s former rival Britney Spears attempting something like this—the idea is insane, a joke. But with the nuclear-voiced Aguilera, who got nasty in public with much grimier originality than Spears’s Hefnerian pigtails-and-letter-sweater cliché, it’s nearly credible. After all, Aguilera has offended much stronger sensibilities than jazz snobbery in her career.
Whatever ruckus she’s raised, it certainly gets her respect here at Teddy’s, where a famous visage or an ultraviolet wrist stamp is all that prevents sudden ejection onto dusty Hollywood Boulevard. A cocktail-table nook is discreetly emptied of patrons as we coast up through the parting throng and alight there, Aguilera sitting down beside her new husband, Jordan Bratman. She looks content and certainly sounds it. “I’m in the happiest place that I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Aguilera had told me. “I’m very peaceful. I don’t feel kind of agitated or upset about everything.”
Although the two are clearly pop royalty, there’s a real knockabout vibe to the young couple, laughingly nudging each other and sipping Cristal, and this has a lot to do with Bratman. A nice little Jewish guy from New York, the 28-year-old music-marketing exec doesn’t immediately strike one as the sort to land a sexpot alpha female. He ambles unassumingly through the modelizing throng, a serene smile on his roundish, stubbly face. In a room where many men wear a thousand bucks in hair products alone, he’s rocking a red Yankees baseball cap and camouflage pants.
But he’s clearly a cuddle magnet for Aguilera, who prior to this has always seemed so alone out there, such a ferocious band of one. Now she’s on a conga line of two, following behind Bratman, hands on his shoulders, butt wiggling to the house music as they leave the nook for the balcony. Flanked by security hulks as champagne flutes periodically manifest from the ether, they are joined by a few pals, including Justin Timberlake and another guy Aguilera refers to as “an old Mouseketeer friend.” Before long, His Purple Badness takes the stage.
In a shimmering orange sport jacket and turquoise guitar, Prince shares vocals with a belting, Afroed soul sister and two preposterously hot backup singers in go-go skirts with Ikettes moves. Aguilera has met The Artist before, and at five-two could even look him in the eye (“He actually seemed smaller than me,” she says). When a deeply intoxicated white guy is pulled from the crowd and forced to…dance, sort of, Aguilera and Timberlake crack up, bending over the railing. “Man, that’s a cool step,” Prince says as the guy exits. “I’m stealin’ that.”
And when I look over at the petite singer beside me taking in the petite singer onstage, I realize something. Maybe it’s the distorting proximity to stardom, maybe it’s the neuron-addling Cristal, but for a moment the idea seems perfectly plausible. A giant talent in a tiny body. A flair for the brash and theatrical. A flagrant lewdness that’s part of the art.
Is Christina Aguilera the female Prince?
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