[Single Review] Christina Aguilera – Your Body
There’s a fine line between good slutty and bad slutty.
Christina Aguilera has been on both sides of the sexy fence during her thirteen year career, shocking and titillating as a good girl gone bad on 2003′s “Dirrty”, and later causing waves of secondhand embarrassment for anybody unfortunate enough to witness the “Not Myself Tonight” fiasco.
When you’re as out of touch with pop culture and reality as Aggie was during the Bionic era, sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom to really put things back into perspective. Now that her flop album and divorce are behind her, and with the bragging rights of having a higher-rated show than Britney Spears, Aggie’s back to doing what she does best, serving up another (good) slutty anthem with her sleazy comeback single “Your Body”.
On the Max Martin and Shellback-produced thumper, Christina hits the town in search of a sweaty post-breakup one night stand. With the skittery drum beat that underlines the verses, “Your Body” could at times pass for a recent Maroon 5 single if it weren’t for the outrageously x-rated lyrics. When Aggie declares that she doesn’t even need to know her temporary lover’s name before they do the deed (“all I need to know is whose place,” she bluntly states), it positions the sexploits outlined in “Your Body” about one rung higher than a drunken bathroom blowjob at the club. But then again, this is Christina Aguilera we’re talking about. Whether she’s wearing assless chaps or pretending to be the modern day Billie Holiday, Xtina never does anything by halves. In fact, just because you didn’t buy “Not Myself Tonight”, she came back with something even filthier just to prove a point. (and if you don’t like it, fuck you!)
But all this dirrty talk wouldn’t be worth much without a good song behind the sleaze, and thankfully, “Your Body” delivers on all fronts. Max and Shellback’s urban-electro production is just as current and commercial as anything else on the charts right now, but it doesn’t sound like anything else out there — a trait that’s present in most of Aguilera’s discography. The raunchy chorus sees Christina reclaiming her throne from Rihanna as pop’s most shameless nymphomaniac, and the song’s breakdown –a whirlpool of pounding beats, synths, and ferocious vocal acrobatics– is positively earth-shattering if the volume’s turned up loud enough.
Never one to play the wallflower, Aguilera brandishes her voice like a sword, boldly swinging at anyone and everyone who ever criticized her for oversinging. When she bellows, “I think you already know my name!”, it’s less of a come-on than it is a battle cry from a pop diva who just successfully clawed her way back from the brink of X-tinction without having to compromise one thing about herself to do so.
If any fault can possibly be found within Christina’s comeback smash, it’s the difference between the leaked demo and the final iTunes version. The decision to push the clean version –replacing “fuck” with “love”– is like reading Fifty Shades of Grey with the naughtiest bits omitted, and some of the vocals have been overly polished, losing the raw edge they had in the demo. Those small discrepancies aside (I’m sure we’ll get the profane version soon enough), “Your Body” is everything it needs to be and then some. It’s Stripped, 2012.
Bring on Lotus.
