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A black limousine rolls through the streets of downtown Toronto.
"What CD do you want to hear?" asks the assistant.
"Put this on, Track Three!" answers the pop star.
The CD player whirrs, the assistant crosses her legs, the pop star smiles.
I had this bad shit uptown, she was whoa! Had me fucked up in the head, I mean whoa! Bought the shit diamonds and pearls, I mean whoa!
"Turn it up!" the pop star yells. The driver glances into the back seat, concerned.
Grenade through your window, shit, like whoa! Love to see me do this, like whoa! Niggaz put me through this, like whoa!
The pop star is singing along now. So is the assistant.
So I'm gonna go toe to toe, blow for blow, like whoa! And rip your torso!
"Play it again," the pop star giggles.
I had this bad shit uptown, she was whoa. . . .
The limousine pulls into the parking lot of Canadian music-video network MuchMusic, the driver opens the door, and the sound of Black Rob rapping "Whoa!" bursts out the doors, followed by the pop star, a teeny blond teen in baggy, Army-green pants.
She walks at the head of a growing entourage to her dressing room and slips into a black baby T-shirt that halts just below her solar plexus, exposing a navel that wouldn't look out of place on the label of a Gerber's baby-food jar. Written in silver on the front of the shirt are the words "I Love Playboy." Dear Reader: Meet Christina Aguilera. She is nineteen now - almost twenty, she says - and she's sick and tired of being treated like a child.
"I wasn't sure if I should wear that Playboy shirt," she admits after the MuchMusic show. "It's suggestive, in a way. So me and my stylist discussed it. And I decided: I'm nineteen years old, and nineteen-year-olds are going to wear things like that. Just because I have a certain image, everyone wants me to be this role model. But nobody is perfect, and nobody can live up to that. I'm living my life."
She realizes that she's beginning to sound pouty and stops, then looks up wide-eyed, earnestly, like an adult: "I think my personality is fighting to come out, and that personality is fighting with the image that everyone else has of me." Teeny-boppers, your good girl has gone bad. Or at least wants to go bad. Or perhaps she's always been bad. Or maybe it's just been a long, confusing nine months.
Two days prior, Christina Aguilera sits in the back seat of a van in Manhattan. No, sits isn't quite the right word for Christina's relationship to chairs. She molds herself into them, slouching her back into the right angle between the backrest and the seat, throwing her legs against whatever object is in front of her and utilizing any wall or nearby stationary object to contour the rest of her body against. She is heading for a final meal at her favorite restaurant chain, Houston's - the same place she dined the previous night - before boarding a flight to Toronto. She has just rented an apartment in Los Angeles, on the other side of the country from her mother and stepfather, and, as she gazes out the window of the van, it dawns on her that she might miss the East Coast. "Oooh," she coos. "I want a New York boy. There is so much energy here."
And what, exactly, is a New York boy? "A little roughneck," she smiles wickedly. "With the bandanna and the cap to the side. You're not going to meet boys like that in L.A."
She kicks her legs into the air, and they fall crossed and tangled onto the back of the seat in front of her. The T-shirt she wears is black, exposes her navel and reads, in letters across her chest, "Rockstar." She opens a copy of the music-insider magazine Hits and begins leafing through it, stopping at a full-color, full-page photograph of DMX. "Mmm," she exclaims. "He is hot!"
It sometimes seems like Christina uses magazine interviews as dating services: Many of the guys she's mentioned as being cute - Fred Durst, Eminem, Enrique Iglesias, Carson Daly - she's later been linked to. Do they get in touch with her after reading that she has a crush on them? "No," she chirps. "We end up seeing each other at parties and whatnot. I've actually hooked up a couple of times. Just for fun. But I haven't seriously dated a celebrity yet."
So now you're going to meet DMX? "I don't know," she giggles. "It's craaaaazyyyy, crazy."
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She buries her nose back in Hits, halting this time at an advertisement for a teen-pop group called Innosense. "There's another one from the Mickey Mouse Club," she says, pointing to one of the girls, Nikki DeLoach, who was in the same illustrious 1993 cast of the show with Aguilera, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez of 'N Sync, and Keri Russell of Felicity. Flip, flip, flip. Stop. This time it's a full-page close-up of Eminem's head. She pulls the magazine toward her face, until it is just an inch away from her well-glossed lips, and whispers something indecipherable to the image. Then she jerks the magazine back and twists her face into a grimace: "Airbrushed!"
She climbs out of the van and into a booth at Houston's. Despite having just recovered from two weeks in bed with the flu (her first real downtime since her debut album came out nine months ago), she orders chicken tenders, french fries, a fully loaded baked potato and nachos (which she likes to dip in all three accompanying sauces - cheese-avocado, sour cream and red salsa - simultaneously). Over this orgy of grease, the subject of Eminem returns.
Though Christina, her mother, her manager and everybody in her orbit like to downplay the incident, it is probably the worst thing that could happen to a nineteen-year-old. Like high school all over again, Eminem decided to spread lies or half-truths (you decide) about Aguilera's sex life in his latest single, rapping, "Christina Aguilera, better switch me chairs/So I can sit next to Carson Daly and Fred Durst/And hear 'em argue over who she gave head to first. . . ./I should download her audio on MP3/And show the whole world how you gave Eminem VD."
"Eminem, man. That's crazy how, like, one comment can make somebody angry," says Christina.
You mean, your comment on MTV?
What happened was, I was asked, "Do you still have a crush on Eminem?" And I said, "He's cute and everything, but he's got too many girls after him. Besides, he's married, so I'm going to stay away from that." It wasn't a dis at all. And if you're going to be that retarded to think that it's a dis, then, you know, I'm not apologizing for anything.
I think there was another reason Eminem was upset. Do you know why?
No.
It was because, on MTV, you also criticized him for his lyrics about getting revenge on the mother of his child. . . .
Oh right, right. I probably said that song [" '97 Bonnie and Clyde"] is disgusting. You know what I mean - jeez. Slicing up your baby's mama and stuffing her in a trunk and shoving her in the ocean with your daughter watching. That's disgusting. I'm sorry, but I think the majority of the world thinks that's disgusting. And I think it was really wrong of him to dis me like that, because all this past year I've been so positive in recognizing his talent.
Obviously he overreacted: Because what he said wasn't at all in the same league as what you said.
I was offended and really disgusted by it. The fact that he is talking about diseases and all that. But I see where he's coming from, in the sense that you take this guy who wants to be respected as a serious rap artist, and all of a sudden he is in the world of MTV and TRL. I can see where he would get a little mad and want to rebel against the Britney Spears, 'N Sync, Backstreet Boys world of teen music. And if he has to do it that way and be that immature about it, then, fine, be that way. I'll just answer it on my next record. [Laughs] Nawww.
Was your mom upset about it?
My stepdad was so cute. He was all ready to get on a plane and kick Eminem's ass. I was like, "That's OK, Dad, it's all right." It's good to have support like that during those times. You know, it's hard to be in the spotlight. You may be having a rough day already, and you come home and turn on the TV, and then you see [the video with] Eminem with that upset look, sitting between Carson Daly and Fred Durst.
Speaking of that, do you know where his lyric about the MP3 came from?
I have no idea.
Fred supposedly was talking about you on someone's answering machine.
For real? It is a whole complicated thing. That messes with your head. Fred is crazy. Fred, man, how dumb are you if you're trying to get with somebody and then you are going to appear in a video that flat-out disses her. You know what I mean? Fred and I were actually being cool with each other: He took me out one time and bought me a milkshake. He was just like, "I know this bomb-ass place for milkshakes," after we left this club. He was so cool. Then I started hearing all of this stuff, and I was tired of it. I was like, "Something is up, he is being shady." He flat-out told me before the video came out that he was in it.
Did you know what it was about?
I hadn't heard much about it, but I knew that he was talking all this bull about me. But if he really did tell Eminem that, none of it is true. Seriously. I haven't spent "quality time" with either of those two guys.
Which two guys?
Fred and Eminem.
[Excerpt From Issue 844/845 — July 6, 2000]