"Ain't No Other Man" by Christina Aguilera

Song 42:

"Ain't No Other Man" by Christina Aguilera

Peak: 6

Year: 2006

Year end position: 32

Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/12

Chronological Songs by Artist: 10/12

Video?: Yes

Wikipedia?:  Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't_No_Other_Man

Spotify?:  Yes

Lyrics:  http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/christinaaguilera/aintnootherman.html

We are a full week into the list of "Ain't" songs, and we have our second "Ain't No..."song, which, as you may remember from yesterday is a double negative.  The correct re-write of this song would be "There Isn't Any Other Man".

This is also the first song we've heard from Hall of Famer Christina Aguilera.  I was curious about her chart life, and she had her first top 20 hit in 1999.  It didn't seem that she started all that long ago, but a full 25 acts have started later than Christina and already made it to the Hall of Fame, so I guess she has.  As a matter of fact, her career seems to somewhat mirror Jennifer Lopez, who we first heard from a few days ago.  They both started in 1999, and Jennifer Lopez only had one more top 20 hit than Christina Aguilera.  I don't usually think of those two together, but it seems like maybe I should.

Christina has had a few iterations of herself in her career.  She started off as a straight forward pop singer.  After that, she dyed her hair black and toughened up her image a bit.  The song today comes from the stage after that.  She adopted a "Baby Jane" persona and had her songs influenced from the sounds of the 20s and 30s.

This song isn't the first song we've had that features sampling of other people's music, but it is the first one that has sampled songs in a way that I like.  My personal opinion is that I don't like it when an artist takes an entire song, lifts the vocal track off of it, and then performs over it.  The reason I don't particularly like this technique is that I almost always know the original song that the artist is sampling.  I also think that it's not very creative to just write new lyrics to go over an established melody.  There are a lot of singers / rappers that employ this style, and I think it cheapens the song a little.  Today's song uses a little bit different strategy.  It takes songs that are relatively obscure (to me), and incorporates them to make an entirely new sound.  They also aren't huge samples of the original song.  They are small clips, which just add a little flavor to the song.

This song samples two songs that, honestly, I had never heard of.  There is a line at the beginning where a woman says "Do Your Thing, Honey".  This song was "The Cissy's Thang" by the Soul Seven.  The saxophone piece that you hear throughout the song was a sample of "Hippy Skippy Moon Strut" by Dave Cortez & the Moon People.  Not only had I never heard those songs, I had never heard of those acts (To be fair, I had heard of Dave "Baby" Cortez, but not the Moon People).  You can hear the scratches and pops of the original vinyl recording on them, which gives the song a little bit of an old-timey feel.  That's why I feel that the use of the sampling on this song is handled well.

The song is a pretty straightforward tribute song.  The song was written not long after her marriage to Jordan Bratman, so the rumor is that it was partially inspired by him.  They got divorced 6 years later, so maybe the initial enthusiasm wore off.  While it lasted, Christina seems pretty excited about the guy in the song.  The song reads like a complete laundry list of all the great things that this guy is.  There really seem to be no end to the superlatives that she heaps on this guy.

One of the only strange things lyrically that Christina does in this song is that she changes the focus of the pre-chorus in verse one and verse two.  In the first verse, she is talking about herself when she recites all the people that she's told about this great guy.  In the second verse, she changes focus so she is singing to the guy who he should tell, and she changes the last line to " Tell your mother, your brother, your sister, and your friend / And the others, your lovers, better not be present tense".  I like that little change to the lyric.  It mixes up the lyrics just slightly.

Looking back at the lyrics, the song is Christina singing directly to the object of her affection.  Almost all of the song is describing what she likes best about this guy, and she's using the pronoun "You" throughout.  That makes the song a little more immediate.  I like this technique.  I've heard the Beatles purposefully employed this to great effect early in their career.  It made the relationship between them and the audience seemingly closer.  It never seems like a bad idea to steal from the Beatles.