Trust Christina Aguilera to provide the decade's prettiest ballad. This is now the third record in my chart taken out of her album Stripped, the album that does what its title promises: presenting her in her nakedness, physically and emotionally. What it exposes is a young lass who is all at once a sensuous and sensual being, an intelligent and opinionated human, and a sensitive and soulful woman. This specific record represent mainly the last two couplets.
The message here isn't trivial. Throughout the modern age, the goal was to "cure" humanity of everything that was considered deviant, ugly or crude, and people were compelled to hide their divergence lest they would become social pariah, or even be locked up. Seventies punk was the first to lash out against this approach, emphasizing and identifying with all things that were considered crude, ugly or deviant, spitting them in the face of society and demanding that it accepts them as well. By the nineties, punk values overtook rock and infiltrated many other places, slowly reshaping the Western psyche. And in the dawn of the new millennium, Aguilera takes this approach to the top of the charts, with a record that is a universal anthem for self-acceptance in the face of a disparaging society, accompanied by a clip showing people learning to love themselves despite their divergence. Both the record and the video had a strong impact when they came out in 2002.
The song was written by Linda Perry, a rocker who had moderate success in the nineties, but remained marginal. Pink, the pop princess whose style was leaning towards rock, acquired her help in writing songs for her second album in 2001, and she subsequently became a songwriter sought by most pop princesses, employing them to invest the mainstream with punk values, and becoming one of the persons responsible for the power of this decade's female pop. This is the crowning jewel of her work, but it is hard to think of anyone who could sing it as well as Christina, and I can't think of any other face I would rather fill my screen in a video whose subject is beauty.
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