Welcome to my Bubble

By Josh Tryangiel

In the history of pop music, there is exactly one good song about celebrity: Fame, which required the combined effort of David Bowie and John Lennon to be brought into existence. Otherwise, from the Rolling Stones' Star Star to Britney Spears' Lucky, the subject has been a disaster for any artist who comes near it. It's not that people aren't interested in celebrity--Mary Hart's summerhouse is a monument to the contrary--but that the pleasures it provides are voyeuristic, defined completely by the distance between the famous person and the average viewer. But great pop music erases distance. It takes our dumbest secret thoughts (He doesn't like me! No one has ever loved as deeply as I am loving right now!) and, with three chords and some magic dust, renders them glorious and universal.

On their enormously hyped end-of-summer albums, Christina Aguilera, Paris Hilton, Beyonce Knowles and Jessica Simpson all at least pretend to provide their listeners with the universality of great pop. But each singer--or, in Hilton's case, the person whose voice rises and falls rhythmically on the album--is known as much for her multiplatform celebrity as for her songs. All four women feel the need to tend to constituencies that may have wandered over from TV, the multiplex or the gossip-mag rack, and inevitably they usher their notoriety into their music. For those of us who like pop for pop's sake, the degree to which the albums succeed is entirely a function of how much the singers keep any mention of their fame--and the distance it creates--to a minimum.

With her previous album, Aguilera became a much bigger story than her music, largely because she appeared to have arrived on the set of the video for her song Dirrty direct from an intergalactic hooker convention. (She earned that extra r.) Aguilera's latest is titled Back to Basics, a signal that she's put away the assless chaps and is ready to focus. Basics, already the top-selling album in the country, sprawls over two discs, the lesser of which is dedicated to the singers who have inspired her. On Back in the Day, over vinyl scratches and a minimalist beat, she ticks off her roster of heroes (Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, etc.) as if the past is a green room in which she can mingle with legends without regard for their individuality; in the end, all the greats just get filed under "fun music." Aguilera doesn't know much about history, but she has a voice with the blasting power of a fire hose and the gumption to treat every song like a five-alarm blaze. She absolutely devours Makes Me Wanna Pray and Ain't No Other Man, a great big goofy love song that moves with such pace and brass that you can imagine taking two quick steps, thrusting out your chin and taking flight over its chorus.

When Basics is cooking, an entire minute may pass without reference to Aguilera's paparazzi-stalked life. But all too often she breaks the spell to remind us, just in case we're wondering, that she's "still got that freak" and is Still Dirrty. If we're monitoring her feud with a former producer, there's a score-settling taunt ("Looks like I didn't need you"). And anyone who finishes both discs with unanswered questions about her much publicized marriage to music executive Jordan Bratman is obviously stone deaf. Aguilera isn't singing pop on these songs; she's preaching to an imagined choir, and she saves her worst for last. Thank You (Dedication to Fans) is a maudlin montage of voice-mail messages from people--soldiers in Iraq, kids on the edge--whom her music has inspired. Its inclusion has a late--Michael Jackson vibe, as if Aguilera thinks her mission is nothing less than saving listeners' lives.

Jessica Simpson, famous newlywed turned famous divorce, has no such ambitions for A Public Affair. Simpson owes her career to the MTV reality show she did with her ex, boy-band alum Nick Lachey, and her album is an unapologetic bit of celebrity striptease. For starters, there are the title and some Jackie Collins-- quality liner notes ("I believe in fantasy, but no longer do I believe in fairytales"). Simpson's voice is blandly likable, but she overemotes so much that you can't fail to deduce whom she's talking about on I Don't Want to Care and Let Him Fly. You half expect to see an Access Hollywood camera lingering over your shoulder. Her narcissism might have been leavened by good songs, but most are content to rip off tunes from older, better hits. (Walkin' Round in a Circle is credited as containing "interpolations from Dreams," written by Stevie Nicks. Interpolations? Between You & I--which should be Me, but never mind--is an uncredited rip of Unchained Melody.) A Public Affair is a titillating glimpse of Simpson, but it provides no evidence that she knows or cares about anyone else.

Beyonce is also half of a much discussed couple, although her career has never been defined by her relationship with rapper and Def Jam Recordings president Jay-Z. Still, on her previous record she and her boyfriend got together and whipped up Crazy in Love, a colossal hit that rivals the Ronettes' Be My Baby in its ability to turn an innocent crush into something worthy of a wall of sound. On B'day, Beyonce's second solo album, the power couple tries to recapture the magic on two tracks, Upgrade U and Deja Vu, and it's not the fact that they go back to the well so explicitly that lames the songs. It's the rapping. Jay-Z is the best M.C. on the planet, but like every other rapper, he has no subject other than his own glorification. Here he steps into the middle of fast-paced love songs to wink at real life: "Rumors you on the verge of a new merge/ Cause that rock on ya finger is like a tumor." It's an unwelcome distraction.

Even though Beyonce includes Encore for the Fans--really just a spoken-word intro to Listen, a song from her upcoming motion picture Dreamgirls (Don't ya just love cross-promotion?)--B'day holds up because the bulk of the songs aren't about her or you or anything at all. Get Me Bodied has no hummable melody, a title I don't understand and a chorus that repeats "Can you get me bodied/ I wanna be myself tonight." But set to a double-Dutch rhythm by producer Swizz Beatz, with lots of hand claps and whistles and maybe a passing marching band, it's impossible not to sway from side to side, and Beyonce, whose voice really is a wonder, cuts through all of it with crystalline joy. Suga Mama ("I'ma be like your Jolly Rancher, that you get from the corner store/ Or I'ma be like a waffle cone that's drippin' down to the floor") is another song so exuberant in its desire to entertain that it literally invites you onto its lap.

When word got out that Paris Hilton was planning to sing, people reacted as if killer bees were headed north from Mexico. Their instinct was to flee, but they were kind of curious too. Really, how bad could it be? As expected, there's some not-so-nice stuff on Paris. Hilton's genius, if you care to call it that, is that she has commodified every ounce of herself, and it takes a mere 6 sec. on Paris before she coos her signature catchphrase, "That's hot." She also includes a nasty song about Nicole Richie and a trashy cover of Do Ya Think I'm Sexy that makes Rod Stewart's original seem like Nessun Dorma.

But the truth is...Paris ain't bad. Hilton can't sing in any traditional sense of the word, but I Want You and Stars Are Blind--"Even though the gods are crazy/ Even though the stars are blind/ If you show me real love baby/ I'll show you mine"--are credible pieces of late-summer pop, on which she not only banishes her persona and exhales in tune but also understands that a crush is not the end of the world, just something everyone happens to relate to. Could it be that Paris speaks for all of us? Well, no. But not speaking for herself is achievement enough.