CHRISTINA AGUILERA - "Beautiful" (Patreon)

(#949, 8th March 2003)

One of the notable things about “Beautiful” is that having written it, Linda Perry wanted to keep it for a proposed solo career – it was one of her “personal” songs. So the question is - would the song make more sense sung by a woman staring down forty, her big hit a decade gone, in a business that’s notoriously unforgiving to women who age? Is its scenario - panic’s sudden grab at the throat - one that transfers?

It’s a rhetorical question - very clearly it has transferred. “Beautiful” is a song about self-acceptance and self-belief, but it’s also a song that’s plain-spoken about the barriers to that happy state: anxiety, doubt, the baffled condescension of friends. 

The strength of the song, in fact, lies in its layers of ironies and overlapping meanings. “Words can’t bring me down” could be a statement of empowered strength; it could also be a rosary clutched in desperation against oncoming despair. The performance is a showcase of Aguilera’s melisma and lungpower, but she wanted to re-record it, hearing the imperfections most listeners would never register. A miniature of the song’s main point - that anxiety doesn’t align to actual abilities or circumstances - it can lurk unspoken under the most perfect or bombastic exterior.

As communication of that idea, “Beautiful” succeeds - indeed it performed beyond any expectation, forging a subgenre of self-belief pop which we’ll be returning to again and again. As a performance, it steamrolls you. Aguilera moans, she whinnies, she trills, she sighs, she bellows, she unlocks all the show-pony tendencies she held in check on “Dirrty” but still comes from a place of conviction. 

As an actual listening experience, though... I like it, on balance, but I somehow don’t quite trust it. I like the corny but unashamed way it builds momentum, but I don’t like how it shifts to “we”, making a claim for something universal. I like the way it captures the suddenness of insecurity, but I don’t like how beauty is the solution. In the end it’s a dilemma the credo of self-love always runs into - is the aim to transform your flaws into virtues, or just to acknowledge and live with them? Where does defiance become narcissism? It’s unfair to ask a power ballad to answer those questions, but the more “Beautiful” asserts itself as an anthem, the more pressing they become.

6 out of 10