1999 Christina Aguilera: Genie In A Bottle

There are those among us old enough to remember when it were all green fields around here. For myself, I'm old enough to remember when Christina Aguilera was marketed as the girl next door type. I guess she still is, as long as you happen to live next door to a strip club, but even if she wasn't parading around in school uniform in 1999, the seeds of her more….liberal…. future were already being sown; 'Genie In A Bottle' is no less sexually suggestive/exploitative in its innuendo-laced painting of the young Aguilera as a virginal bottle fizzing with pent up hormones just waiting for someone to pop her cork. You just have to rub her the right way. Apparently.

But apart from seeing Aguilera all fresh faced and not tarted up in some burlesque/S&M dominatrix outfit and wailing about how ‘Dirrty’ she is, the biggest surprise I now get from 'Genie In A Bottle' is, well, just how dull it sounds. Which isn’t the song’s fault per se - since 2001, I've become far more au-fait with The Strokes Vs Christina Aguilera mash-up creation that pastes Aguilera's original ‘Genie’ vocal directly onto the backing to The Stroke's 'Hard To Explain' to create 'A Stroke Of Genius', an inspired match whose spark and crackle trumps the jaded derivation of its component parts.

Because in giving it the rock setting of The Strokes' guitars, Aguilera's low moan of a vocal gets charged with the mischievous longing of a woman dying for her bottle to be rubbed. The match is so 'right' that Aguilera genuinely sounds like she's singing a different song to the limp pop/R&B stylings that carry this 1999 original and which provide an environment for her not to care less in to the point that it's tempting to think the backing had deliberately been switched by some moral crusaders, intent on protecting her virtue by sabotaging the sexual frission her vocal sparks when it strikes against a harder surface.

And that's a shame, because at least that context gives the lyric a certain 'grown up' legitimacy (instead of fuelling some teen sex male fantasy) and would keep it away from the impressionable young teens that were her audience. 'Genie In A Bottle' remains a solid entry in her back catalogue, but this is pop not so much with an edge as pop spiked with rohypnol and passed to the unwitting. And once the dust from the stockings, bras, basques, high cut pants and low cut tops has settled, it's probably one of the dirrrtiest things she's ever done. But not in a good way.