Lotus

Christina Aguilera

One of the great things about consuming a lot of music in a given year is that you have already been surprised. When I listened to Fun.’s debut record, I was pleasantly surprised. When I heard the first few tracks of David Lynch’s Crazy Clown Time, I was upset by how surprised I was at the lack of merit to his experimentations. With Christina Aguilera’s Lotus, I was expecting a pile of trite garbage. This time, I was very much not surprised.

It would be easy to blame the shitiness of this record on the fact that it is so incredibly main stream and that when you release a main stream pop album you have to attempt to appeal to the largest audience possible. I could say that in attempting to appeal to everyone they ended up appealing to no one. I could say all of that and more, but I would be lying.

This album is just bad. It’s not bad because it’s popular. It’s not bad because it’s going to outsell Deerhoof and I’m going to be upset by that. It’s bad because it has no fucking idea what it wants to be. Christina can sing, and I will give her that. Actually, I won’t. Christina has a gigantic voice that needs to be corralled because when it is, it is a true musical gift. On this record, however, there is so much melisma that it sounds like part of the album was recorded during a fucking earthquake while other parts sound like Christina was being told that she was adopted.

Aside from the actual sound and timbre of her voice, the lyrical work on this album is an embarrassment. Songs go from being a strong independent woman that will fight anyone to being a soft, tender woman that needs love. She goes from heartbroken to heartbreaker in the blink of an eye. While the artistic vision on Lotus may have been to show the full range of what women can do and be, it turned out like a hot fucking mess of garbage without anything resembling a narrative.

The most offensive part of this record is that Ms. Aguilera is supposed to be someone that young girls can look up to. She has fluctuated in weight and appearance and she has stood up to bullying and buying into a societal ideal of beauty. And while she may not have asked for this mantle, she has carried it long enough to know that this is part of who she is. With song concepts ranging from being lost and lonely to wanting to fuck somebody’s brains out to being a one-woman-army of pissed off indifference, I don’t see how a young girl is supposed to garner anything from this record. And if Christina loses that, she is in big trouble.

While concept album strictness need not apply to music today, an album should sound like it was written by one person or, at the very least by a group of people with the same artistic vision and voice. This album sounds like it was written by 15 different people all sitting in different rooms where each person was given a title and a small amount of melisma to use at their discretion. This is choppy, confused and terrible. Please do not listen to Lotus. I like Christina Aguilera and I will listen to her music with an open mind but when albums like this come out, I hesitate a little longer before I do.

With Love,

Jason R. Noble

Track to Dig: “Blank Page” — In this skit, Christina is playing a women without direction that is in need of the love of a good man. She is soft, powerful, interesting and honest. This is what I was hoping the entire record would be. It wasn’t.

Track to Miss: All other songs — This album is garbage and one good gem cannot possibly make up for the pile of garbage that is Lotus. My apologies to those that have listened.