Caught in the Carousel

Letter from the Editor - February 2011

A few hours before the Super Bowl my friend Mike told me that I needed to give Christina Aguilera a chance.

We had been talking, as we often do, about the great voices in popular music and although we agree about everyone from Jeff Buckley to Freddie Mercury, we part on the subject of Aguilera. He thinks she's not been captured best on record, but her live performances evince the sheer power, range and brilliance of her voice.

I don't see it that way.

I see it like this: Christina Aguilera reminds me of "Nuke" LaLoosh, the character Tim Robbins played in Bull Durham—tons of power, but an inability to get the ball over the plate.

How long are we going to be giving Aguilera a free pass just because she has a powerful voice? Every single time she makes a mistake: a bad album, a bad movie, a shoddy performance, everyone always talks about how great her voice is and I think it's getting pretty silly. Let's be honest, if he even made it that far, LaLoosh would last about six minutes in the Major Leagues.
"He's got great power," the pitching coach might say.
"Yeah, but he keeps hitting the peanut vendor," the manager might reply.

Aguilera's lyrical flub at the Super Bowl during the "Star Spangled Banner" was excusable; it's a high pressure situation, the song is demanding, I get it. (Although an over 80 Tony Bennet nailed it at the World Series a few months ago.) But my problem with Aguilera was not the forgotten lyric, it was the mess she made of the song. It was sheer vandalism. Even if she had nailed the words, the performance was such a massacre, it wouldn't have mattered. Augilera has no idea what to do with her voice—she knows it's got heat and muscle, but heat and muscle don't amount to anything without phrasing, without interpretative finesse and without nuance.

Aguilera hasn't got any of these things—she's a singer who lacks any of the natural instincts necessary to make it through a song with anything close to originality. She lacks the touch of Streisand, the invention of Simone or the textbook grace of Dion, who, though she may not be an original singer, certainly knows how to get the job done.

Aguilera has no identity. She's sexy, she's naughty, she's bisexual, she's a mom, she's married, she's divorced, she's dirty...whatever. The fact is, she has no idea who she is as a singer. A few years ago on her Back To Basics album she seemed like she was gravitating to the forebears who wrote their name in song on the walls of history—Franklin, James, etc. but even that outing was surrounded, temporah-like with over produced filly-fally and studio electronica. She seemed to be intending to make an old school big-band record with jazz and bluesy overtones, but she showed she was only willing to hint at the glamor of past eras without doing the actual work.

Last year's Bionic was a strained and fearful leap back into pop music where Aguilera tried to out-Gaga Gaga, resulting in one of the most disastrous albums in recent memory.

Don't even get me started on Burlesque, who's money shot comes midway through the movie when Aguilera's mousey Ali Rose, deferential and retiring up to that point suddenly belts out a winner that stops everyone cold in their tracks. The This-Girl-Can-Sing message was supposed to shake both the characters in the club and the movie-going audience.

At that point I shrugged my shoulders and kept eating my box of Junior Mints.

Why is Aguilera still trying to prove she san sing? We get it: you've got the power. Now do something with it.

Or, as the Canadian singer/songwriter Eric Corne wrote on my Facebook wall a few weeks back: "It's great that you have a three octave voice—now move me in one of them."

And there you go.

**Farewell! A word that must be and hath been:
Gary Moore
Trish Keenan (Broadcast)

Alex Green
Editor, Caught In The Carousel
Alex670@earthlink.net