The surprising stories behind 6 of Christina Aguilera’s biggest hits

By Alim KherajPUBLISHED: 08 OCTOBER 2016

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It can be easy to forget that Christina Aguilera is one of the biggest-selling solo female artists of all time. Yes, the singer’s latest musical outpourings haven’t necessarily been the most successful in terms of album sales, but it’s hard to deny the musical knock-on effect of 2010’s Bionic or the fact that ‘Your Body’ is a complete and utter banger.

From her beginnings as a teen-pop sensation with ‘Genie in a Bottle’, to her maturity on the UK million seller Stripped and her comeback as a soul diva on Back to Basics, she’s not easily definable. Her latest song, ‘Telepathy’, from the soundtrack for Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix show, The Get Down, is arguably one of the best songs of the year.

With that in mind, and with scarce news of Xtina’s rumoured “caviar ratchet” sixth English-language album, we’ve decided to delve into the singer’s back catalogue to unearth the surprising stories behind her biggest hits.

1. ‘Genie in a Bottle’ wasn’t the musical direction that Christina wanted to go down…

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Like both Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera made her start on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club TV show. However, it wasn’t until the star signed a record deal and started making waves as a popstar that she became a household name.

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The instantly catchy and lustful ‘Genie in a Bottle’ caught the attention of the masses. Despite this, Christina wasn’t originally too keen on the track. “To tell you the truth,” she admitted to MTV News back in the day, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I really didn’t want ‘Genie in a Bottle’ to be my first single.”

Expanding on this, Christina recalled how A&R man Ron Fair had called her to tell her that he’d come across a song that he thought was amazing, originally called ‘If You Wanna Be With Me’. “He said that it had good potential and thought it would be a smash,” Christina said. “So I heard it, but I actually wasn’t too crazy about it.”

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She decided to record the song anyway. “Once I got to the mic and worked on it,” she explained, “it became something else. I’m really proud of the results.”

At the time, Christina was fairly new to the music industry, so she didn’t quite get how song-writing credits worked. Thus, while initially she said she didn’t co-write any of the material on her debut self-titled album, it transpired that the singer did actually have a hand in the creation of her sound.

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In his book Christina Aguilera: A Star is Madd the Unauthorized Biography, Pier Dominguez claims that Christina took responsibility for the “come, come, come on and let me out” hook. Similarly, he states that Christina was also involved with some of the production of the song, adding some ad libs and switching up drum sounds.

Despite its debut at number one of the UK chart, and topping the Billboard chart for five weeks, Christina still didn’t feel a connection to the song. “I was held back a lot from doing more R&B ad-libbing,” she would say later. “They clearly wanted to make a fresh-sounding young pop record, and that’s not always the direction I wanted to go in.”

2. ‘Dirrty’ was a risk that didn’t pay off like you thought…

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It was clear that Christina Aguilera wasn’t the artist that RCA Records wanted her to be. While she fit into the mould for her debut album (as well as a Spanish-language album and a Christmas record), she wanted to distance herself from the manufactured pop image. Enter 2002’s Stripped.

The album’s lead single couldn’t have been further from the well-behaved pop image. Sex was on the menu, and it wasn’t subtle.

Having worked with Christina on ‘Lady Marmalade’, producer Rockwilder was curious about what else this burgeoning young popstar had to offer. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he recalled how, when Christina was starting work on Stripped, she wanted it to be “down and dirty”.

Rockwilder had previously worked on a hip-hop track called ‘Let’s Get Dirty’ with the rapper Redman, who featured on Christina’s track, and he thought that he might be able to shift the track into the pop sphere. “I figured since ‘Let’s Get Dirty’ was a hip-hop song, flipping the song for a pop artist would be whole different situation – and it was. It woke the song right up,” he said.

Dealing overtly with themes of sex and sexuality, ‘Dirrty’ was a risk, as was its raunchy video. “It’s just me being me, that’s all it is,” Christina told ABC News. “I’m always going to be changing and evolving. I think it scares people when a woman is comfortable with her body, comfortable with herself, her sexuality.”

Linda Perry, who has worked extensively with Christina throughout her career, at the time voiced her concerns that the singer’s talent would become overshadowed by the controversy surrounding her new image. “I just looked at Christina and said: ‘Are you high? This is annoying. Why are you doing this?'”

Replying to this, Christina acknowledged that it was a bold move. “I knew a lot of people would not be ready for it,” she said. “The great thing is that everyone, whether you loved it or hated it, had an opinion about that song and everybody talked about it.”

When quizzed later by MTV about why she decided to add an extra “r” to the song’s title, Christina explained that she wanted to “personalise” it. “I felt like having two r’s, kind of like grrr, like when you say it you want to go, ‘Dirrrty,’ ’cause that’s how it’s supposed to be. Gritty, like the video, [with] underground, illegal stuff going on,” she said. She also revealed that she contemplated the titles ‘Dirtee’ and ‘Dirrdy’. Yikes!

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Despite being wildly successful in the UK – the track reached number one on the Official Singles Chart – ‘Dirrty’ never even cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, landing just outside at number 48. It seems that conservative America just wasn’t ready to sweat until their clothes came off.

3. ‘Beautiful’ might be all heart, but it’s got a bitchy backstory…

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‘Beautiful’ has become Christina’s career-defining song, and it’s often cited as her best. However, despite the song’s sentiments of acceptance and self-love, there’s a bit of a bitchy backstory.

Linda Perry worked with Pink on her 2001 album Missundaztood, and played the track to her during some recording sessions.

Perry was then introduced to Christina. “When Christina came over to my house to start working, she asked me to play some songs to break the ice,” Perry recalled in an interview with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. “I played ‘Beautiful’ for her, and she comes over by the piano and she’s like, ‘Can you demo that for me and write the lyrics out? Because I want it.'”

Perry then recalled how her heart sank as she really wanted the personal track for her own solo project. “I had a long conversation with my manager about it,” she said. “We both decided to hear Christina sing it. We demoed the song with her singing it, and I was like, ‘Wow.'”

The fact that Perry had given Christina ‘Beautiful’ didn’t impress Pink. “I took it really personally when [Perry] started working with other artists, particularly artists I didn’t like,” Pink said. “I don’t think imitation is the highest form of flattery, I think it’s annoying… We had a falling-out and I took it personally.”

Perry recalls the spat in a similar fashion. “[Pink] kinda left me on my own and I resented her for that. We never have been the same since then,” she said.

4. ‘Ain’t No Other Man’ formed part of an experimental album that was all about #throwbacks…

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Reinvention was on the cards again for Christina following Stripped. After baring her soul on the 20-track opus, Christina wanted to explore her influences. As was her wont, the success of Stripped also allowed Christina the opportunity to exert her creative freedom. “I’m the only one in charge of the ship now,” she said to Blender magazine in 2006. “If it sinks, it’s my fault.”

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Luckily, Christina’s third record, Back to Basics, was a success, as was its lead single ‘Ain’t No Other Man’. A record of two parts, BTB was separated by two different concepts. The first “disc” (it was actually spread across two separate CDs) was songs inspired by Christina’s favourite artists and soul legends. The tracks were modern, however, filled with numerous samples, hip-hop drums and cutting-edge production.

With ‘Ain’t No Other Man’, Christina teamed up with DJ Premier, who has produced almost exclusively hip-hop songs. “I was surprised I got that call ’cause of our differences in the audiences we hit,” the producer revealed to MTV. “She described what her album is about and then she sent me some CDs of what type of stuff’s been inspiring her to make the record, and it happened to be a lot of stuff that I grew up… Once I saw that’s the vibe she wanted, I still had to make it sound like the way my beats thump and stuff but still give her the atmosphere she’s trying to bring out.”

In particular, ‘Ain’t No Other Man’ was a departure from the work that DJ Premier had previously been involved with. “The song is real, real fast, which is definitely different for me, ’cause I don’t do real fast tempo,” he said. “This thing is like 130 beats per minute, but it still sounds like hip-hop Christina.” However, he was drawn to the fact that Christina was pushing the boundaries of what was then considered commercial music. “She took a risk and did a whole new style. I appreciate what she’s doing, giving me a chance to rock,” he said.

Christina was also pretty impressed with DJ Premier, too, having been a fan of the work he’d done with his work in hip-hop duo Gang Starr. “Along with being a fan of his, I thought he would really get into this world I had envisioned, with the throwback album meeting the hard-hitting beats of today,” she said to MTV News. “He goes beyond being just a beatmaker. He has a great ear for what sounds good vocally and what a sloppy ad-lib is.”

5. ‘Hurt’ caused friction between Christina and co-writer Linda Perry

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The second “disc” of Back to Basics was also an experiment, but one that didn’t rely on making the old sound modern. Rather, the nine-track collection focused on paying homage to the recording processes of the past.

Working exclusively with Linda Perry on the second half of the record, Christina forwent samples and drum machines for real instruments and old-school microphones. “We creatively went into our own zone and our own world together,” Christina recalled. “There are no cover songs, so we made more of a ’20s, ’30s vibe with an authentic and organic twist. There are no samples — it’s all live music…[One] song sounds like it was actually recorded in the 1920s, using a vintage microphone, so it’s exciting stuff.”

In the book Behind the Boards: The Making of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Greatest Records Revealed, Linda Perry revealed how ‘Hurt’ actually stemmed from the death of her father less than a year prior to writing the track.

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“[Christina] came to me, and had these two chords that her and this guy wrote, and she was like, ‘I really like these chords, can you turn this into a song? I want the song to be about losing someone,'” she said. “Inside of me, I’m going, ‘You little f**king bitch, you totally know I lost my dad and now you’re gonna milk me for my emotions.'”

Adamant that she wasn’t going to give into Christina’s manipulations, Perry decided that she’d give the singer a mediocre song and “pretend there was no emotion behind it whatsoever”. “It ended up being this beautiful song about losing my dad, and the pain that I’m going through, and the guilt and regret for not being more present for him,” Perry continued.

6. It probably wasn’t Christina’s decision to include ‘Not Myself Tonight’ on Bionic at all

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Almost four years (and one greatest hits album) after Christina released Back to Basics, rumours started to fly that the star was working on a new record. A strange and rather amazing list of contributors were bandied around, such as Goldfrapp, MIA, Santigold, Ladytron, Le Tigre and a then underused Australian singer-songwriter called Sia. Christina wanted to create an album “about the future”.

“I was completely inspired by a lot of electronica when my son was born and we both were listening to it a lot together,” Christina said to the Today Show. “You know, having a child makes you think of the future and the next generation, and I got really inspired by electronica, which is so no-holds-barred with its sound and technology, and I wanted to really experiment with that.”

While Christina seemed to have been given free reign with Back to Basics, her label, RCA, weren’t content to let the singer fully take control of Bionic. Despite the singer drawing in the above impressive list collaborators, the label drafted in songwriter and producer Polow da Don to assist on some songs for the album, including the Nicki Minaj collaboration ‘Woo Hoo’ and ‘Not Myself Tonight’.

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In an interview with Marie Claire three months before the album was released, Christina seemed to confirm that ‘Glam’ would be the record’s lead single. However, something changed in the run-up the release and at the last minute ‘Not Myself Tonight’ was picked as the song to lead the campaign.

‘Not Myself Tonight’ is the only song of Bionic’s 23 tracks that Christina didn’t write. Speaking to Ryan Seacrest about the song’s inclusion, Christina said it was added after she came back from filming the movie Burlesque.

“I was finished with my record and I put it on hold,” she explained. “By the time I was finished with the movie, I had more things to say and more stories to write about. That’s how ‘Not Myself Tonight’, the first single, got birthed.”

In what could be read as shade, Christina went on to make sure it was known that she didn’t have a hand in writing the song. “I really make sure that I write all my material because it’s really important that I feel it. But that song kind of showed up at my doorstep… I was asking for tracks, and whatnot, and that just kind of showed up,” she revealed. “I was like, oh my God, I have to sing this song – it’s just so me.” Hmm…

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Upon release, the song was met with criticism that Christina was trying to keep up with the dance-pop trend that had burst on to the scene while she’d been between records. At the time, Christina defended the inclusion of the song.

“I do have songs on there where I went into them saying, ‘OK, let’s make a more commercially driven record,'” she told Billboard in a cover feature. “That’s maybe where ‘Not Myself Tonight’ comes from. But I always have to have an integrity factor with it. There was actually a song that the label really wanted me to record, and I just said ‘no,’ because it didn’t fit on the album – it wasn’t creatively inspiring to me.

“They said, ‘It’s a hit, it’s a hit!’ And absolutely it’s a hit for someone. But it’s not for me, because when it jeopardises my integrity too much I can’t do it,” she continued, before not so subtly digging at RCA. “The hit thing…’Who Let the Dogs Out’ was a f**king hit, you know what I mean?”

While producer Tricky Stewart, who worked with Christina on the album’s meaty middle section, claimed that he thought Bionic was a commercial failure due to poor promotion, Ladytron argued that it was RCA that “f**ked up” the record.

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“The way she played the album to me was her original vision,” said band member Daniel Hunt. “She was on the right track but the record label f**ked up everything, to be honest.”