Christina Aguilera Back To Basics CD

This CD includes "Back To Basics" bonus video.
Christina Aguilera seemed intent on constantly reinventing herself over the course of her first several albums, and it's hard not to be impressed by her leaps from teen-pop sensation (1999 self-titled debut) to raunchy, sexually precocious R&B singer (2002's STRIPPED) to blues and jazz-steeped diva on 2006's BACK TO BASICS. With its smoky torch songs, occasional big-band arrangements, and allusions to seminal divas like Billie Holiday and Etta James, the ambitious double disc casts Aguilera in the soft, romantic light of vintage soul crooners.
Yet BACK TO BASICS is undeniably modern. In fact, the first disc, assisted by the hand of the always-stellar trackmaster DJ Premiere, thumps alongside any club bangers of the early 2000s. Aguilera's dirty-girl persona is still present here, but she's dressed up and fitted into better songs and productions. The nostalgia-hued vibe of the second disc--with the singer playing the breathy chanteuse--provides a perfect complement to the first, so that the album as a whole reveals an artist of increasing range, skill, and creative maturity.
When Christina Aguilera released her garish, sexually charged sophomore effort, Stripped, in 2002, it seemed that she pushed her obsessions with tweaking taboos just a little too far. Sure, she could still sing, but her music was now driven entirely by skeletal club grooves and explicit carnality. It was a bold break from the teenybopper persona she was desperate to shed, but it was overcorrective steering, taking her a little bit too far down the road toward a grotesque caricature, particularly in her ugly video for the album's lead single, "Dirrty." All this grandstanding provoked an intense reaction, not just among fans but among her collaborators, who also wondered if Christina was going a little too far, but she managed to keep from sinking largely on the strength of the ballad "Beautiful," an empowering statement of self-love that managed to dampen "Dirrty"'s impact even if it didn't erase it. It also set the stage for the next phase of her career: as an outright old-fashioned diva, much like Madonna or Cher. Smartly, she followed this path for her third album, the sprawling, deliriously entertaining double-disc Back to Basics.
The title alone on Back to Basics is an allusion that perhaps Christina herself thinks she might have gone a little too far with Stripped; she stops short of offering an apology -- she even has a song where she proclaims she's "Still Dirrty" -- but this album's emphasis on songs and singing, along with the fixation with the big-band era, does suggest that Aguilera is ready to be once again seen as a world-class vocalist. Nevertheless, Back to Basics also makes clear that Stripped, for as flawed as it is, was also a necessary artistic move for Christina: she needed to get that out of her system in order to create her own style, one that is self-consciously stylized, stylish, and sexy. As the endless series of pinup photos in the album's booklet illustrates, Christina is obsessed with earning credibility through association: she dresses up as a big-band vamp and drops allusions to Etta James, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin, all under the assumption that listeners will think of Ms. Aguilera as the heir to that throne. While she may have the vocal chops to pull it off to a certain extent, Back to Basics doesn't quite feel like it belongs to the classic soul and R&B tradition, even if the second disc is designed to be an old-fashioned jazzy R&B album, complete with bluesy torch songs and occasionally live instrumentation. Aguilera's instincts are too modern to make the album sound classic. She remains stubbornly autobiographical -- she disses departed producer Scott Storch on "F.U.S.S.," again addresses the abuse inflicted on her mother by her father, spends much of the album detailing her love for her new husband, Jordan, and always filters everything through a very peRolling Stone (p.96) - "The spirit of old-school jazz, blues and soul inhabits the set....Aguilera succeeds in balancing references to jazzbos and soul singers...with over-the-top kitsch."
Entertainment Weekly (p.136) - "[The] rugged dance tracks, mixing electronic beats with honking brass and other '70s soul samples, are perfectly suited to Aguilera's powerhouse belting." -- Grade: B+
Q (p.120) - Ranked #48 in Q Magazine's "100 Greatest Albums of 2006" -- "[P]roducers DJ Premier and Mark Ronson helped Aguilera realise the mix of saucy soul and roaring gospel she envisaged."
Uncut (p.99) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he second disc is the more interesting....It's psychedelically strange and outrageously entertaining."