Two ideas drive much of Christina Aguilera’s new double album, “Back to Basics”: one is that, as she states in the first song, she wants to “understand what made the soul singers and the blues figures that inspired a higher generation, the jazz makers and the groundbreakers”; the other is a recurring assertion that she has been misunderstood, and unfairly criticized. (One response to her alleged critics is a creepy track where, putatively celebrating her fans, she replays some of their voice-mail messages. It’s a long way for Aguilera to go to remind us how “amazing” and “inspiring” she is.) In the course of twenty-two songs that move from the thrilling through the well-intentioned to the overwrought, it becomes clear that Aguilera’s new album doesn’t have all that much to do with the “blues figures” or the “jazz makers.” That’s fine—Aguilera doesn’t need to reincarnate Sarah Vaughan to be a serious singer. She already is one, in the tradition of nineteen-nineties pop and R. & B., skillfully deploying melisma for razzle-dazzle, riding the bouncy syncopation of samples with the coördination of a rapper, and timing the phrases to imply her athletic dance moves—or, better yet, yours.
Aguilera, a small woman with a frighteningly capable voice, débuted in 1999 with one of teen pop’s happiest moments, “Genie in a Bottle,” a song driven by a broadly sexual metaphor: “You gotta rub me the right way.” She tweaked her assigned role of coquette by making it clear that she could whisper ecstatically, on pitch, or sing hard enough to break bulletproof glass—who cared if she writhed around in the video? The album containing “Genie” went on to sell more than eight million copies. Aguilera’s second album, “Stripped,” contained several tracks written with Linda Perry, originally of the dull nineties rock band 4 Non Blondes and now one of pop music’s reliable hired guns. (She is responsible for some of this decade’s best radio hits, including Pink’s “Get the Party Started.”) Aguilera’s irrepressible voice brings out the schmaltz in Perry. On “Stripped,” Perry’s most significant contribution was “Beautiful,” a barn burner for everyone who has ever felt less than cute on a Friday night. “I am beautiful, no matter what they say—words can’t bring me down,” goes the chorus. The way Aguilera hits the last five words—which Perry wrote as a descending line, momentarily slowing the rhythm, in a motion that pulls against the lyric’s prideful claim—produced her “Rocky” moment. You know she’s going to raise her fists and jump when she reaches the top of the steps, but you get goose bumps anyway.
“Back to Basics” maintains the plucky spirit of “Stripped,” and the songs on the second disk were co-written with and produced by Perry. In “Back in the Day,” Aguilera names some of her “groundbreakers”: “Break out the Marvin Gaye, your Etta James, your Lady Day, and Coltrane.” Though you can’t really argue with the choices, Aguilera lists her inspirations like a teen-ager with a MySpace page linking to her favorite bands; she establishes affinities, but saying doesn’t make it so. She probably does love John Coltrane and Etta James, but, aside from a few diverting period pieces—like “I Got Trouble,” a sepia-toned re-creation of early Billie Holiday engineered to sound like an old 78-r.p.m. disk, and “Candyman,” a tribute to a sexy man that sounds like the Andrews Sisters—there are precious few audible connections to any music predating the seventies soul of Stevie Wonder. (She does effectively evoke him several times.) For all the carrying on about history, a high-concept glamour photo shoot in the CD’s photo booklet—take that, downloaders!—is Aguilera’s most successful resurrection of the past.
Without a song as well written as “Beautiful,” Perry and Aguilera circle the idea of sophistication to little apparent purpose and fill up the disk with sodden, obvious ballads. The ballads do, however, give Aguilera room to sing spectacularly—“Mercy on Me” is one of several examples. (She also, on “Save Me from Myself,” apes Fiona Apple’s quiet brand of self-torment.) It’s a shame that Aguilera’s voice outstrips her ambitions. She is a pleasure to listen to, no matter how daft the lyrics.
The first disk, with almost half the tracks produced by DJ Premier—a bona-fide hip-hop auteur who usually works with rappers—is more fruitful. Aguilera and Premier, along with a gifted songwriter named Kara DioGuardi, make tense and fervid dance music on the first single, “Ain’t No Other Man.” Premier provides a compressed drum pattern that pushes along and then pauses, like a mindful pedestrian, for the zooming delivery truck of two huge horn blasts. Aguilera begins her vocal with a long, vibrating “Hey” and moves into a supple holler when she sees her man—“Something about you caught my eye”—only to interrupt herself and drop into a double-time whisper: “I don’t know what you did boy, but you had it.”
“Still Dirrty” is another rich combination of DioGuardi’s elastic melodies and Premier’s brusque rhythms. But their talents are squandered on one of Aguilera’s anxious impressions. “Still Dirrty” refers to the 2002 single “Dirrty,” from “Stripped,” which Aguilera promoted by performing in the video wearing little more than chaps, and in serious need of a bath. She seems to think that a major controversy resulted from her appearing so scantily clad, and concludes, “If I want to be provocative, well, that ain’t a sin.” Anybody who has a few minutes to walk down the street and scan the billboards, or thirty seconds to browse the Internet, will find this an epic understatement. It is hard to imagine what kind of real impediment she, or any other underdressed performer, is encountering.
Justin Timberlake is under an equally strange impression on “SexyBack,” the first single from his modest but satisfying new album, “FutureSex / LoveSounds,” where he bafflingly claims to be “bringing sexy back.” Does anything need bringing back less than sexy? It’s like proposing to bring back petroleum, or the N.F.L. Like Aguilera, Timberlake began his career on the “Mickey Mouse Club,” proceeded to experience enormous popularity as a member of the boy band ’NSync, and then trundled off toward maturity, trying to put some distance between himself and the preteen squeals. As on his first album, the excellent and sleek “Justified,” from 2002, Timberlake collaborated with the producer Timbaland, one of the most important forces in the past ten years of pop music. After slowing down for more than a year, to devote time to weight lifting, Timbaland has returned to the charts, with the singer Nelly Furtado, whose playful single “Promiscuous” stayed at No. 1 for six weeks this summer. Perhaps Timbaland still had Furtado’s quirky, charismatic voice in mind. The beat for “SexyBack” is so small it’s barely there—it needs either a big, gruff m.c. to fill up all the spaces or a tiny, girlish voice to wind around the synthetic underbrush. Timberlake does neither; his voice is sweet but not flexible, and he is at his most believable when creating breathy, multi-tracked harmonies and playing the sincere side of seduction. On “SexyBack,” Timberlake does his best to be callous and thuggish, an imitation of the bad boys he convinced your mom he would never be. (If there is anyone in pop less comfortable singing the word “motherfucker,” he hasn’t made a record yet.)
Most of “FutureSex / LoveSounds” sticks to the uncanny, ethereal funk that made “Justified” so appealing, and is savvy enough to retain Timberlake’s image as a teen cutie pie while making the sounds around his voice just shiny enough to fit the album into the landscape of 2006 pop. “My Love” is based on the kind of effortlessly odd beat that earned Timbaland his reputation: a shuddering keyboard figure that keeps trailing off and then coming back; gross, loping bass sounds; and samples of human beatboxing. Timberlake is back on bended knee, where he is most comfortable: “If I wrote you a symphony, just to say how much you mean to me, what would you do? If I told you you were beautiful, would you date me on the regular—tell me, would you?” There is no shame in going back to your own basics. ♦