From the glaring sexploitation of its packaging to the dark tale of physical abuse that gets dropped near its close, Christina Aguilera's Stripped (RCA) embraces the curious celebrity custom of marketing self-revelation as a badge of maturity. Fortunately, there's a catch. Unlike Britney Spears, whose last album tanked on a similar tack, this one-time teen idol justifies her adult behavior by demonstrating some hard-won artistic maturity as well. So if she reveals as much skin as our PG-13 culture will allow in the CD booklet and gets "Dirrty" on the disc's first single, this 20-track, 78-minute shed-athon also unveils her personal take on every pop style now thriving under America's wide blue skies.

The catch turns out to be number 22, the age that Christina will turn come the first virginal snows of December. On the opening title track, she claims she'll stoop to "no hype . . . no pretense"; later, on "Make Over," she insists, "I don't need nobody to make me over/I just want to live simple and free." Yet the array of styles here suggests that Stripped is about the coy, girlish game of dress up. In the end, the album is so far from being "stripped" that the only listeners who could be moved by all her revelatory guff are those who still have a lot more growing up to do than Christina herself. And that guff includes "I'm Okay," which she penned with Pink's pal Linda Perry to let the world know about her dad's abuse.

Of course, guff is the stuff that pop is made of, especially when the pop star in question is attempting to straddle all the categories that compose the über-genre. An age and a half ago, Michael Jackson did just that with an album that lived up to its title, Thriller. But perhaps it takes a freak of culture like Jackson to make this superhuman mission seem so natural (and even he pulled it off only once). Although Aguilera has co-writing credits on 14 tracks, and though plenty of those songs take real chances, Stripped still feels designed by committee. On just the first four numbers, she hits smooth hip-hop, sultry R&B, cheesy hard rock, and agile Latin pop like a politician reeling off an incongruous list of campaign promises. Several of these songs also air her habit of emptying her words of all meaning as she packs them with bigger wallops of emotion, the way Whitney or Mariah or Celine would.

As it turns out, however, she tempers that habit more often than not, demonstrating the kind of soulful restraint that Whitney and Mariah warmed to only as their careers started falling apart and that Celine will never warm to. She no longer automatically runs through the pyrotechnic arpeggios that made her homonymous 1999 debut such a landmark of teen-pop bad faith. These days, her will-to-power impulse emerges only in the clench-throated wail that flattens cuts like the hard and trendy hip-hop single "Dirrty" and the hard and kitschy rock move "Fighter." Mostly she just relaxes in a style that Mariah and Whitney and even Michael tried hard to transcend -- R&B.

"I want the boys with the flava," Aguilera told Rolling Stone recently, explaining why she doesn't generally date white males. Her preference doesn't mark this white female as a freak of culture, just a product of her times, but it may help explain why she differs from white performers ranging from Teena Marie to Madonna and Elvis to Eminem. Each of them adopted a black style and refashioned it. For Christina, sounding black (and almost looking black on the album cover) is just her most profound way of dressing up.

Not only isn't this necessarily a bad thing, it's often downright thrilling. Take "Underappreciated," a number that leaves behind Whitney and Mariah for the spirit of their soul godmother, Aretha. At once smooth and stinging, it shows off Christina's dead-on tone, her crackling timbre, and a funky sense of timing that makes even the mature Madonna sound like a virgin. It's the best song on the album, save for "Get Mine, Get Yours," a scorching dance track about adult sexual prerogatives that boasts the only lyric on the album fully worthy of its sophisticated musical setting. She told Rolling Stone she almost left the number off the record because it's the only tune "without depth of meaning." Hey, she's still young, right?

Issue Date: November 22 - 28, 2002