I love you, Christina!

I always thought that crushes on pop stars and matinee idols were beneath me, but I have a real thing for Christina Aguilera.

It isn't just that she's gorgeous, of course. If that's all there was to her, she'd be just another model or something like that. No; that girl has real R&B pipes. She has an eight-octave range, greater than most any other performer today. You know that trick where someone can shatter wineglasses with their voice? Christina Aguilera can actually do that.

The first time I heard a song by her on the radio, I was amazed that, in today's excessively image conscious music industry, a huge black woman could make it and produce a single.

When I saw a photograph of her, I refused to accept it, and I naturally assumed two things were going on:

1) There was some kind of 'Milli Vanilli' thing, where she was the "face" of a middle-aged black performer;

2) She used evil sorcery to steal that voice from a soul singer.

As for the first possibility, if it is true, it probably would have come out by now. And as for the second, I have yet to see the seashell where she would keep that voice around her neck.

So I have to assume that she's basically a female version of Rick Astley, a Jimmy Olsen looking dope that has an R&B voice as big as the outdoors.



During the first wave of jailbait pop tarts in the early 2000s, I made a prediction: after all was said and done, Christina would be the only one still around with a career. I'm proud to say that I was pretty much right...at least in the sense that she's the only one still around and known primarily for making music as opposed to being primarily famous as freakshow tabloid fodder. I have zero idea who she's dating or ever dated, for instance. Christina avoided the trap that the other members of her generation fell into: being famous for being famous, as opposed to being famous for still working.

I was always a little offended that she was lumped into the same category as the rest of the early 2000s pop tarts, because she sounds absolutely nothing like the rest. Listen to her CDs: they're pretty much soul and R&B songs with a pop edge, instead of being pop with a hint of soul or R&B.

Tragically, she fell into the Madonna trap of courting controversy and seeking attention instead of just letting the music sell itself, a strategy that was totally unnecessary with her talent. It's a shame that Dirrty was viewed as more emblematic of who she was than something like her Spanish-language album, for instance: despite the fact that she's half-Cuban (like me - and Cameron Diaz too, incidentally), nobody ever thinks of her as a "Latin pop star."