I Can’t Stop Writing About Crappy Music.

I just listened to Christina Aguilera’s new album, Back to Basics. I did this because I thoroughly enjoyed her latest single and a New York Times story I read made it sound like the whole album would be similar.

Let me get something out of the way first: the music sounds great. DJ Premier has given Danger Mouse a serious run for his money as this year’s greatest pop- album producer. The samples, the horn charts, the late-Sixties-in-Memphis atmosphere, the warm vinyl crackle that permeates the album: I could listen to hours and hours of this, and if there’s an instrumental version of the album, I would seriously consider buying it just to listen to.

But as a singer, Xtina is no Cee-Lo Green.

Yeah, okay, whatever, she’s the best singer of the manufactured-popstar explosion from six years back. She can hit notes, she can hold them for as long as she needs to, she can sing a bunch of different notes really fast, and she can use the top of her register without fear. What she can’t do is make herself sound like a human being. Her voice makes me think of plastic, of vinyl in the floor-covering sense, of Formica: it’s shiny, endlessly adaptable to any purpose, and looks good when it’s new. But it’s not real in the sense that wood, stone, fabric, or even glass is.

Which wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t open a song on the album placing herself in the pantheon of Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Otis Redding, James Brown, and Gladys Knight, singers whose cloaks she isn’t fit to carry. Those are real voices, the natural materials of my plastic analogy. They carry weight, and express sorrow, resignation, anger, lovesickness, peacefulness, tenderness, all-consuming joy. Xtina’s voice expresses nothing but “I am singing.”

If only it were that good, actually. The lyrics are an embarrassment, fraught with clichés, dunderheaded rhymes, and nothing that hasn’t been said a million times more expressively and intelligently before. (I don’t demand that pop stars have great lyrics, by the way: I love doo-wop as much as anyone. But she’s trying to pass herself off as more than a pop star — ooh, she writes her own songs! — and with that “artist” privilege comes taking the critical lumps.) But you know, it’s fine, ignorable, standard-issue R&B stuff, okay, whatever, until the final three songs on the album, what I’ve decided to call the Trilogy of Defensiveness.

First, she proclaims her resolve to continue being Dirrty, regardless of those (possibly mythical) critics who think, I guess, that she shouldn’t? I don’t know; it’s one thing to say you’re a nasty girl who embraces a sexual image, and another thing to get pissy when the controversy you’re courting happens.

Second, she unloads against all critics, anyone who thinks she’s not good enough, or whatever (again, it’s a little unclear), but really, anyone who's ever said anything bad about her is the target. (So, that would be me.) She’ll still be here when all of us are shown up for the fools and pedants we are, is the message. A fairly common pop-star song, especially for a second or third album, I take it, but taken right after the other song it starts to sound peevish.

And third, in a deeply weird move, she belts out a thank you to her fans, interspersed with clips of fans describing how awesome she is. I listen to a lot of weird music, but no hour-long shrieking, squalling feedback drone has ever made me feel as uncomfortable as this song. I have issues with the very idea of fandom (it smells too much like actual idolatry to this Bible-raised boy), but I guess I’m cool with people letting celebrities know that they've had a positive impact on their lives (but goddammit, live your own lives, people! I keep wanting to say). But what kind of self-involed narcissist displays these messages in public? If she’s so great, I should be able to figure it out from her records, without having to refer to taped messages from several of the gay guys she inspired to come out of the closet. As it is, she sounds defensive and whiny.

Madonna knew enough to never address her critics directly, and now she’s a critic-proof institution. But I guess in the era of MySpace, mixtapes and dumbass beefs, even the girl in the celebrity bubble gets her feelings hurt by some snot with a review blog, and doesn’t even stop to realize that the great thing about being a pop star is that you get to ignore people talking shit about you.

Nothing on the record is as good as Ain’t No Other Man, by the way; nothing twirls, feints, dodges, then leaps and soars like that song. It sounds most like a Quincy Jones-era Michael Jackson song, and that’s appropriate: the man is, after all, the greatest narcissist of our age.