Christina Aguilera's debut album turns 20 today. Look back at our 1999 cover story on the pop star
HRISTINA AGUILERA is strapped into the back seat of a black stretch limousine like a sapphirering in a jewelry box. She is tiny – five feet two in heels – with white-blond hair, swimming-pool-blue eyes, a waist as big around as big around as a football and hands that look small enough to fish a contact lens out of a drain. She is being chauffeured through Westchester County, New York, on her way home to a new apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Jet lag and nervous excitement kept her up until 3 A.M. last night, just hours before her 6 A.M. call at a New York radio station. After a full-day photo shoot, she is heading home for the evening. But it’s not over: Tomorrow, Aguilera will appear on, and the next day she’ll travel to the teen-pop Holy Land, MTV’s, where “Genie in a Bottle” is chronically the Number One most-requested track.
“When she was two, I knew what Christina was going to do,” her mother says. “She’d line up all of her stuffed animals and sing to them with my little majorette baton – that was her ‘ikaphone.’ She was too young to pronounce microphone! I’ve never seen anybody so focused. When she was older, if there wasn’t a block party or somewhere for her to sing, she’d get irritable.”. “I was eight, and I sang Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All,'” she says, daintily munching a McNugget.
Aguilera’s introduction, “Genie in a Bottle,” is sugary pop – once heard, never purged – but it doesn’t showcase her vocal strength or control. Unlike most teen poppers, Agui – lera can cut it without a multitrack studio. Imagewise, she isn’t the typical red-cheeked kid next door, either. She’s a teen diva, a kind of legal Lolita, proffering precocious “Oops, did I say that?” innuendo and belting songs like her life depends on it.
Aguilera wants to be many things, but a “pop girl” isn’t one of them. She wants an edge. “I always want to shock people, throughout my career,” she says. “Like Madonna.” Maybe that’s why she has crushes on rock stars. “I had a long-running crush on Mark McGrath [of Sugar Ray], but that’s over,” she says flatly. “He’s totally cute, but his whole presence is arrogance. Plus, I’m not diggin’ the way he’s looking now. Fred Durst is cute, but he doesn’t make the crush list.
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