Christina Aguilera
!
PLEASE STOP WITH THE DA** MAKEUP. PLEASE.
I really think Christina is a beautiful girl...woman. She looks exotic and unique and has a style that's all her own. She wields confidence and sex like a weapon and that's never been a bad thing with me.
But please...please...when something looks ugly on you, it just looks ugly on you. Looking at pics of Christina recently, she looks ugly. She really does. And that tan! She looks like someone sprayed mud on her, took out her original eyes and replaced them with glassy fake-looking ones.
During the 2000 Billboard Awards, when I watched it with my mom, she pointed out to me how Christina looked just like a witch while Britney looked healthy and comfortable. I defended Christina at the time, but now I'm beginning to see what she saw.
Christina is someone who always stressed the importance of being real, being uninhibited, and being yourself. I don't know what her definition of those terms are, but to me slapping on twenty-some pounds of tanning lotion and surrounding your eyes with huge black blobs don't exactly constitute the general definition of "real." And I'm not even going to touch those implants rumors(no pun intended). I don't believe she got them in any way, but I'm just not going to go there anyway.
She just doesn't look comfortable or...dare I use the term "herself?"
The thing is that it's not all the time. Just look at VMAs last year and even to an extent the Olympics and Grammys this year. We know she's perfectly capable of looking gorgeous and comfortable in her skin and sexy at the same time, when she doesn't have all those layers of fakeness caked on her. There's no correlation with being beautiful and being sexy and being real with being edgy, and I just don't see what she's trying to prove. Is it just "her?" Her style? Somehow I find that hard to believe. I feel from her words and her attitude that Christina is such a genuine, direct, and capable person, it's just that sometimes it's hard to judge by her words when her actions speak otherwise.
And I know I shouldn't judge by appearance. But it's such an undeniable aspect of her that it's difficult to just say her sense of image doesn't reflect an aspect of her personality, at least a little. And it is my personal opinion that anyone who spends so much time and effort into making themselves look so different from what they really are is not completely comfortable with who they are. That's just my take on it.
And with that aside...
I love Infatuation. It's such a perfect song for Christina and she handles it so well. The best part of the song comes at the end, where she starts wailin' all around. And considering the lyrics, it does seem to come from a personal aspect of her life, and I think it's cool she wrote it like that.
But I have been getting admittedly dead tired of waiting for this album. I don't mind her taking some time or whatever it is she's been doing, but when you consider that the original MTV article talking about the album stated that it was going to come out in Fall or Winter 2001, at this rate it's going to have been delayed for almost an entire year since the first "official" release statement. People need to stop inventing excuses for her, it just makes things worse; the fact is that there were a lot of dates released that weren't wholly "made up" by the media, and they keep getting discarded month after month after year. And if anything got old and ridiculous a long time ago, it's the constant "Oh what are you talking about? The album wasn't going to be released this month. It's going to be released, uh........next month! Yeah...that's it, next month! You must have been misinformed. It's next month. Really." I mean honestly now, it's a bit embarrassing the way all this is being handled. There was even a specific MTV interview with her previewing the album back in...what? March? And now they say it's coming out in August or September. That is half a year's difference, you know.
I think that it's going to be a great album...from the tracks they previewed, I think it's going to be awesome. I only hope that it makes up for the tedious waiting period of it all.
Updates as of 1/24/2003...Oooobay Chrissy...what to say...
I don't know if I like her as much.
I know, I know, shoot me now, I know.
Is it because she's just been out of the spotlight for so long? But that's not really true either. She hasn't been out of the spotlight, she just hasn't released anything for a long time. And there have been loads of other artists I like who have released less things over an even longer period of time, and I don't like them any less.
Don't get me wrong, I still like Christina a lot. It's just that before, if you asked me who I thought was better, Britney or Christina, I would have been like "Ehhhhh I dunno...maybe Christina?" whereas these days it'd be more like a unwavering "Britney."
I don't really know why. I loved Nobody Wants to Be Lonely. I loved Lady Marmalade. I still think she has a strong voice and amazing potential. She still looks lovely...when she takes the time to. Just physically speaking she looks so much healthier and healthy = sexy to me.
But I just cannot sit here and praise her like I did before. As of this moment I think she is overrated, by others and by me. And the crappy part of it is that I know, I know, that when she comes out with new material I'm gonna be all fawning over her again, so many that really is the materialistic reason.
Or at least I hope so. A part of me may just be bored with her since it's been so long...I swear, almost two years, since she's had an independent project out, no matter how you cut it that's a long time.
But there may be another part of me that feels...I dunno, exasperated by her or something. It's not something you can explain. I think it's almost like a sense of disappointment, when you don't see anything from her for a long time and suddenly all her tiny little imperfections become so large and glaring. It's so petty, I know. Which is why I desperately want her to release something soon so I'll stop looking at her this way;).
One thing I will say though...I do not like it when her fans make her out to be so much "better" and "above" than all those "teen pop" acts around. It's actually a sentiment shared by herself many times, I get the sense that she's "too good" for pop music or something. And that does not jive well with me...I don't like when people make her out to be this R&B queen with a huge hip-hop fanbase led by her rocker voice or something. I realize that Christina samples from many genres and will likely do this even more in the future, after all most artists do this especially in the diverse pop category, but that's exactly what it is...pop music. And I don't like it when people make her to be some unique personage who's separated herself so far from all those one-dimensional pop acts or whatever by being edgy or less than clean-cut or whatever. That's such a perversion of the truth. I don't mind edgy and I don't like being clean-cut all the time either and I like that Christina is experiementing with edginess, but don't act as if it's some advantage you have over your peers, the minute you do is when you step straight into the shoes of all those pop-hating critics and aggro-rockers or rappers who look down on pop as less than real because it's maybe not as aggressive or controversial.
I see *NSYNC trying to reach more of an urban and R&B audience these days, and if ever they start griping about how they want to leave their pop image because it's so not them or that they're so much better than above pop music, I'd say the same for them that I'm saying for Christina: "Cut back on the ego fixation." Fortunately they haven't even begun to do any of those things.
I'm not saying "DON'T BE EDGY!" or "DON'T DO R&B!!!!!" or whatever, it wouldn't make sense at all for me to say that. I'm saying don't do it just for the sake of being "better" than your peers, just for the sake of rising above others. Do it because you want to, because it's natural to you, because it's the direction you want to go towards. Not because it'll make you so much better than Britney or so much different from BSB or so far beyond *NSYNC, because I guarantee that it doesn't. Look at it. Does the media treat Christina as so much more artistic or real than *NSYNC or any other of these acts just because she flirts with edginess and boundaries? No, they treat her as they see it. You can't place respect for yourself, you have to earn it.
That being said, I trust Christina to have the right attitude and to earn that respect:).
Anything below this line are opinions from before that may or may not still apply;).
She's daring and yes, exploitively sexy without being rash or irresponsible about it. I think it has a bit to do with her take no crap attitude.
I'm liking her tunes. She's got the most powerful female voice in the pop industry right now. I love it. There's a big distinction, though, between her singing and her speaking voice, and it's kinda scary.
And yes, she is short. How short, you ask? She's not tall. She's about a few inches short of a Hobbit if ya ask me;).
Though I have to admit, she comes up with the craziest ideas for makeup sometimes. The genie eyeliner thing scared. A lot. I'm personally not big on glitter or huge eyeliners, but whatever floats her boat:). I know she can be very pretty when she tries.
*I also hear that she can be rather pissy at times, but was she ever really unjustified? We get on her for saying some things that may not even be true, and...I don't know, just from those things said alone I can't get the picture of a haughty, pissy person. I just can't.
Read this message from Christina's mother.
*So yeah, I like Christina, so there. She displays a certain level of control. Though I will admit, all heck will freeze over and Eminem will win a Nobel Peace Prize before I let my kid sister dress like her(No, I don't have a kid sister, but hey).