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- Την / Το Παρ Ιαν 19, 2024 7:42 pm
- Αναζήτηση σε...: Ξένη Μουσική
- Θεματική Ενότητα: Christina Aguilera
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Christina Aguilera
Για τους Libby fans, για όσους πιθανόν να ακούσουν αυτό το άλμπουμ πρώτη φορά κάποτε αλλά και για οοοολους τους pop fans.Ένα άρθρο του popmatters για το Liberation που για εμένα έχει μερικές από τις πιο insightful απόψεις που έχουν γραφτεί για την Κριστίνα αλλά και γενικότερα για την ποπ μουσική. Αλήθεια σας το λέω διαβάστε το!!!
Μπορεί να το έχω ξαναβάλει αλλά είναι τόσο καλογραμμένο και "σημαντικό" άρθρο που θα το ξαναβάλω και θα συνεχίζω να το βάζω.
ΙS THERE LIFE BEYOND THE POP LIFECYCLE FOR CHRISTINA AGUILERA?
How do you solve a problem like Maria? With Liberation, Christina Aguilera sings against the pop machine and reworks her legacy.
https://www.popmatters.com/christina-aguilera-2591013516.html?rebelltitem=13#rebelltitem13
Σε αποσπάσματα...
- Σπόιλερ:
In recent years, much has been made of Aguilera’s tenuous relationship with pop superstardom, with many pondering her relevance in the post-melisma, auto-tuned digital age. In her book and subsequent public lectures, Marketing Communications professor Kristin J. Lieb argues, “Simply put, for all but the exceptional few, the career lifecycle for female artists is much shorter than it is for male artists” (89). Has Aguilera’s pop musical lifecycle ended? or is her truth and importance much more complicated?
In Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry Lieb develops a rubric to assess the vitality of particular pop female brands. Generally, Lieb’s lifecycle model contains twelve female “types”: the good girl, the temptress, the diva, the exotic, the hot mess, the provocateur, etc. Each female artist must fit neatly into one box at any given time. Transgress and the lifecycle collapses with the artist reaching creative obsolescence. Beyond the “lifecycle” terminology, Lieb consistently refers to the “handlers” of female pop stars who learn lessons from other success stories in order to better handle their products (30). The reducibility of artists to a marketable brand, a handled and objectified commodity with a sell-by end-date, is implicitly accepted as a core reality of the music industry in Lieb’s work. And yet, Lieb leaves the door open: some female artists can be among the “exceptional few” whose careers can transcend the pop machine. But which ones survive Lieb’s model? Is there a woman both beyond and within the twelve types? Is there creative life beyond the standard pop lifecycle?
Perhaps more than any other modern pop star, Christina María Aguilera breaks the mold and pushes dramatically against Lieb’s suppositions. Although known popularly by the moniker “Xtina”, Aguilera refused from the outset to change her “too ethnic” sounding official name for brand mass appeal. Yet, despite a “brand” that is less concrete than many of her contemporaries, Aguilera is a force to be reckoned with on the popular music scene. In her book, Lieb is admittedly unsure what to do with Aguilera, thinking of her as something like a musical cat of nine-lives. She writes,
“Christina Aguilera is on her third or arguably fourth life as a female pop star […] the unicorn of the female pop star on her third or fourth life! It is critical to remember that Aguilera likely earned her multiple lives because of her legendarily powerful voice—and the fact that she has maintained her pop star good looks throughout her trials” (161).
It is the type of model Lieb sketches that Aguilera—female pop star unicorn—liberates herself from with Liberation. With this eighth album, 20 years into her career.
Aguilera remembers “Maria”, her middle name and the little-girl persona she crafts to remind her why she first loved singing before the music business twisted and sullied her passion, and indicts the pop industry machine that has made of her an objectified-mechanized product with a lifecycle and expiration date.
If you follow the narrative of Kapadia’s "Amy", you will understand one of its salient critiques is a lesson we would do well to remember: in our insatiable appetite as fans for a constant stream of music coupled with the artist’s personality and celebrity, we are complicit in sacrificing true talent and artistry to the pop machine. In refusing to allow time for artistic complexity and growth, we fully subscribe to the simplicity of marketed brands and product types and fail the artist as human being.
Aguilera’s brand paired with her lengthy creative hiatuses raise many questions, but it’s a retrospective of her career artistry that most challenges the lifecycle model and deepens our respect of her.
Aguilera the unicorn resists typecasting. Aguilera as female artist will not conform or fall in line. She challenges; she questions; she pushes; she persists.
Furthermore, with Liberation, the woman is on top sonically. Beyond lyrical content, over the course of Liberation‘s 15 tracks, Aguilera often sings atop male voices, manipulating them or drowning them out.
As she states in spoken-word on the Liberation track “Sick of Sittin'”: “I make it a policy not to tell anybody to sit down as just to encourage everybody else to stand up.” And for this, she has often been punished, held to a different standard than many of her pop contemporaries and forebears
In some ways, Lieb was right not to know what to do with Aguilera the pop unicorn. Aguilera is both incomparable vocally and always compared culturally: a true pop conundrum. From the beginning, Aguilera has consistently served as a foil figure in the pop music landscape. Britney the good girl vs. Xtina the slut. Pink the badass vs. Christina the bitch. Kelly Clarkson the classy vocalist vs. Aguilera the sexpot wailer. Lady Gaga the visionary vs. Aguilera the copycat. One could safely imagine that Aguilera has earned a specialized JD in pop music for representing herself as defendant in this succession of trials often orchestrated by industry bosses and exaggerated by media outlets.
These imagined and quashed past rivalries continue to reverberate in the Twittersphere where shortsighted fans (Aguilera ones included) jockey for position within a culture that accepts Lieb’s suppositions as a given: that there cannot be more than one female type in any position of power and musical significance. It is this peculiar condition of toxic fandom that spawns some of the worst vitriol: for Xtina haters (and therefore usually the fan of some other “pop” star) a typical attack involves calling her “Xtinct”, an unfortunate term that fits into Lieb’s lifecycle model. One imagines in our hyper connected world, Aguilera is both aware of this negativity and responds to it in her typical frankness with an opening Liberation tour montage in which “my existence has no expiration” echoes in disembodied voiceover. Despite presidential evidence to the contrary, Aguilera’s continued evolution evidences that lasting careers are not made from tweets, that artistic integrity and authenticity shape longevity more than popularity, chart performance, and commercial success. Furthermore, to state the obvious, legacies are far more difficult to craft than three-minute melodic pop songs or 240 character tweets. True artistry is something intangible, indefinable, and ultimately immortal. In other words, lasting artists exist beyond the lifecycle of Lieb’s classified types.
In spite of fading album sales and chart success, Aguilera’s legacy thus far seems to make her one of Lieb’s “exceptional few”.
Indeed, with Liberation, Aguilera is not chasing a chart; she’s articulating something much deeper, subverting chart importance to her voice and artistry as a fully realized grown woman. This three track progression at the top of Aguilera’s album—”Liberation”, “Searching for Maria”, and “Maria”—is perhaps the closest we will ever get to a representation of the dissociative aspects of childhood trauma and an adult’s reintegration and liberation from them in pop music. It’s genius, a transcendent masterstroke.
Michael Jackson’s young voice appearing on the song’s bridge adds pathos and poignancy to Aguilera’s own understanding of this history. When Jackson sings to his fictional “Maria”, “Hear my plea for sympathy / I just want you here with me”, Aguilera’s indictment of a culture and industry that uses up child talent and spits them out as adults is damning. More than allowing herself to succumb to her own personal demons more than becoming another cautionary tale in this ongoing narrative, Aguilera does what she has done best throughout her career; she flips the script and turns the mirror on all of us.
With Liberation, Aguilera is calling out to the little girl who giggled, who first loved to sing, and in finding “Maria”, Aguilera is freeing herself from the pop machine and making us all reflect on some really deep and troubling cultural questions. Can we hear the pleas for sympathy? Can we allow our greats to be here with us as complex human beings, do things at their own pace beyond the confines of brands and demand, and create art that has substance and longevity? Can we allow them to live and exist beyond the pop lifecycle?
Aguilera’s “Maria” triptych is all about speaking to that little girl and reminding her that you make music first and foremost for yourself to escape all the elements in the world around you that you cannot control. In this vein, Liberation is less about freedom from limit or thought or behavior and more about a grown woman’s control of all of her titanic sound and fury, sexuality and sensuality, creativity and marketability.
The entertainment industry does things to artists—shapes, confines, contorts, twists, packages, manages, controls, handles—especially following massive success and fame and whetted cultural appetites and the insatiable desire for more. And the results can often be (or at least feel) traumatizing to the individual. Some artists can emerge unscathed, either by escaping the business entirely or learning to work within the parameters given to them. Some don’t make it and all of us are the worse for it. But some—a rare, exceptional few—transform into something else, an uncontrollable force, a hurricane of talent that defies categorization and continues to challenge us in unexpected ways.
Andy Warhol’s Factory gave us the term “pop”, signifying that everything and everyone can be famous for 15 minutes. And yet, perhaps the term “pop star” does not capture the portrait of an artist like Aguilera whose longevity exceeds the lifecycle normally allotted to her. With Liberation, a true vocalist, a self-described “soul singer”, rages against this factory, defies categorization, and adds to her legacy. Liberation is far more than a carefully calculated feminist statement album in the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp; it’s the culmination and continuation of a creative project Aguilera has been producing since sophomore album Stripped: beyond types and lifecycles and industry expectation, Christina “Maria” Aguilera is both a complicated soul singer whose gigantic voice is rooted in her own painful past and a female artist who has never and will never fall in line. The little girl with a big voice turned genie in a bottle turned “Dirrty”-girl Xtina turned retro-Baby Jane Vocalist turned Bionic Madame X turned Lotus flower turned Legendtina has finally become the grown woman with a big voice with something powerful to tell us about the gimmicks, the artifice, and the need for flexibility and change in the pop music industry.
With Liberation, Christina Aguilera—the female pop star as unicorn, the musical cat of nine lives, the de-machine woman—reintroduces herself to the world as a grown woman and reminds us that Maria-the-little-girl-who-sang-for-all-the-right-reasons against the chaos, that little girl is here to stay. How do you solve a problem like Maria? What do we do with a girl like Maria? Nothing. We do nothing. We just let her sing whatever and however and whenever she wants.
From this point forward, what should we do with Christina María Aguilera? I think seasoned professional Tony Bennett was onto the right answer. We would do well to slow down and cherish our great singers while they are with us. They are too important.
The end. <3
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