Not Myself Tonight: Christina Aguilera Reflection
Christina Aguilera’s Not Myself Tonight, sexually provocative as it appears, surprisingly does not evoke many comments referring to the sexual elements as many of her other songs do. According to Kristin Lieb, what Christina presents in Not Myself might be categorized as the phrase of “temptress, where sexuality and sexual availability begin to be more salient,” and the way she is positioned, her songs, her customs, and her narratives are more explicitly, if not utterly, sexual-oriented.
It is noteworthy that many netizens evaluate this song by using the same word “underrated”. This reminds me of Lieb’s saying that when people are describing a star, they often use a word, such as “perfect”, and “gorgeous”, which are words frequently used by media when describing stars. Therefore I googled “Christina Aguilera underrated” to try to prove the credibility of Lieb’s statement. It turned out to have 219,000 results that are related to the keywords, one of which bears the title exactly the same as a netizen’s quote below the video Not Myself Tonight , “why is Bionic so Underrated?”
Another interesting comment drew my attention is presented below:
At the first glance this remark looks nothing more than a mediocre fan’s adoration and praise to his idol’s versatile styles. However, it makes a perfect example of how Lieb’s stand that all phases cannot be remained forever and that pop stars are forever-changing or they won’t get there or remain there for a long time holds true. It isn’t a easy journey to go all the way from a “good girl” to “diva”, obviously. Even if a pop star is in her certain phase in a period, let’s say, the “temptress” phase, she still has to create nuance between each seemingly all-the-same sexual-centered work and make audiences able to tell the difference, thus willing to continue buying such sexuality and consuming her state of being a temptress. The best instance to make is the difference between Christina’s Dirrty and Not Myself Tonight. It is patent that the latter appears to be more explicit in its demonstration of sexuality than the former. However, how audiences perceive is the opposite: less topics are about sexuality in Not Myself Tonight. A comment that Not Myself Tonight is “more dirty than Dirrty but Dirrty looks dirtier” got 744 thumb-ups, which to certain extent reflects on the success of Christina’s effort to keep her a symbol as sexual allure while maintaining this state by presenting something different every time the similar theme comes out. Yet then a question arises: what makes people think the level of sexuality is different in the two songs when both of them are so exotic?
I guess the answer lies in the strategy by which Christina and her agent team employed to transform her from a temptress to a diva. As many fans have already noticed, the style in this song resembles greatly with that of Madonna, who is the biggest idol of Christina as she claimed. Christina had explained that this song was made as a tribute for her idol Madonna, which resolves the similarity of their styles. However, as far as I am concerned, rather to say that the song is for saluting her idol, it is more fair to suggest that by imitating the typical style of a diva, Christina was trying to prepare herself to actually be the next. And of course, instead of explicitly exposing this ambition, she hid this behind her respectful love for idol, which explains why audiences perceive the song less dirtier than it appears to be. Therefore, I would say that in this song Christina fits in none of the categories; she was in the transition from the phase of temptress to the next step – diva.
Among the comments below Not Myself Tonight, there is one that criticizes Adele being uninventive by singing sad songs always. Adele is my favorite female singer so far so I will not agree with anyone who is trying to condemn her music style. However, it is noticeable that almost being unchanging from the beginning to now, Adele is the exception of Lieb’s theory, which emphasizes the vital relation between ever-changing style of a pop star and her long-standing popularity in her career. Adele became famous for her extraordinary and unique voice and has maintained her success in music field till now she’s undoubtedly in the position of diva . Although she had experienced a period in which people were talking about her look, she’s never constructed her success through her appearance. If one category has to be put on her in her early career, I would say that she fitted in the “good girl” type the most as the following video shows. In this video she sings on the stage with her beer and jokes, casual, relaxed and easy-going, making one netizen say he wants to marry her in the comment below.
