For the second single, Aguilera once again wanted to release a ballad. She’d thought of herself primarily as a balladeer, a young Mariah Carey type, but her A&R rep Ron Fair had instead sent Christina into the pop zeitgeist that her former Mickey Mouse Club castmate Britney Spears had helped to create. Christina hadn’t wanted to release “Genie In A Bottle” as her first single. But Christina was still young and untested, and the threat of one-hit wonder status still hung over her. “ Genie In A Bottle,” the first single from her self-titled album, had become a straight-up summer smash, dominating the Hot 100 for more than a month during a competitive moment in chart history.

It’s not a song that anyone needs.Ĭhristina Aguilera was at a crucial career point when she released “What A Girl Wants” as a single. Today, though, “What A Girl Wants” stands as one of the lesser smashes of the Y2K-era bubblegum renaissance. All that chaos didn’t stop “What A Girl Wants” from reaching #1, cementing Christina’s hold over the TRL nation, or supplying a title for an Amanda Bynes high-school comedy. In all those rough drafts and re-recordings, “What A Girl Wants” became its own out-of-control beast, like a would-be blockbuster movie that has way too many studio execs’ fingerprints on it. Even before Christina first recorded it, her A&R guy made the song’s writers change a key lyric. It’s also not the single that Christina Aguilera wanted to release. The version of “What A Girl Wants” on Christina Aguilera’s self-titled album isn’t the version that made its way to #1. “What A Girl Wants” went through a few different iterations before reaching its chart-topper form. In the middle of the whole thing, there’s Christina Aguilera, seemingly bent on proving that she can sing 58 notes per second. But “What A Girl Wants” also has a lot going on - sputter-clap drum-machines, synth-string blinky-blinks, a weird little baroque breakdown. It’s a giddy love song, a thank-you to a boyfriend who understands how to not be an overbearing asshole co-writer Shelly Peiken was thinking about her husband when she came up with the lyrics. “What A Girl Wants,” Christina Aguilera’s second #1 hit, seems like it should be simple. Sometimes, the song gets lost inside the song. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

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