Back to Basics forms a sort of complement to the White Stripes. Battening on to African-American musical traditions from the pre-rock era, they proceed as if that could make post-rock music good again. The difference is that the Stripes see the pop miscegenation as the problem, to the solved via purification: a staggering, hypocritical misreading both of musical history and their own role in it. Christina Aguilera is more interested in looking back through the miscegenation to choose her parents from a rattle-bag of race music, and then let the process of pop impurity run its course accordingly from those reimagined beginnings, to see what it can do. To say that this demonstrates that Christina Aguilera is eleven times smarter than Jack White — not canny, not "pop-savvy," but actual-synthetic-reasoning smart — will surprise only the few remaining humans who haven't yet understood that the talented lad Jack White is, alas, a moron.
None of this is to say that Xtina's retro-soul-chanteuserie is news, even for her. As the Village Voice review for her last album noted four years ago:
For 10 songs, Christina Aguilera's record is aggressively boring, unless you're fascinated by her half-repressed yen to remake "I Put a Spell on You" as it might be done by the Velveteen Rabbit.
There's something faintly amazing about taking the weakest idea on a record (none of the hits, you'll recall — "Dirrty," "Beautiful," "Fighter," "Can't Hold Us Down" — partook of this investigation) and deciding it must become the full-blown conceit for the next album. This is a bit like De La deciding after their debut that the follow-up should be all skits. It's just not likely to work; having a concept is not the same as having a good concept, or understanding your own strengths. The best that can be said is that the conceit is largely irrelevant: the album has three good songs, which is about what one would hope and expect from your basic Aguilera product (though the last had five or six; in a decade, we'll see that as a wild exception).
Buried beneath all that jazz and discourse, however, is an interesting drama: there seem to be two discs exactly so that they can confront each other face to face. Disc Two is the Linda Perry disc; she co-wrote every song on it, and this has been widely noted. Considerably less-remarked-upon (though Sasha touches on it here), Disc One is the Kara DioGuardi disc; she co-wrote every song but one, though the's often credited lower down the list. But don't let that fool you; this is because the producer is credited second after Xtina in each case — then, on all three of the disc's excellent songs ("Aint No Other Man," "Slow Down Baby," "Without You") comes Ms. DioGuardi. One can hear her willing the project's conceit to work, even if it means rewriting "I'm Free" and Welsh one-hitter Donna Lewis.
By now you will have done the math. If the album has three good songs total and the first disc also has three...the second disc is left with zippo. It's deeply awful. This brings us no pleasure, as Linda Perry is one of the facts that has made popular music great over the last half-decade. But in this staged but unstated confrontation between the two popstar whisperers (a perfect phrase stolen from Garrett Kamps) who have underwritten much of the Top 40 since, roughly, 9/11 and the end of the High Teenpop Era — in this competition conducted through the medium of Ms. Aguilera and contrived historical style, DioGuardi turns out to be the girl with the most cake.