Justice For Christina Aguilera’s ‘Bionic’: A Revolution Begins

Sam Lansky | August 22, 2013 9:28 am

If you missed the details of Lady Gaga and Perez Hilton‘s batshit Twitter feud, here’s a recap: Lady Gaga, a Bennington thesis who also sings, accused her former bestie, celebrity gossip gremlin Perez Hilton, of stalking her at her New York City apartment, prompting Hilton to claim that Gaga is a Very Bad Person who has pathologically sabotaged the careers of her contemporaries (namely: Christina AguileraNatalia Kills, Kerli, Katy Perry, Porcelain Black and also someone named Truth Tea, with whom I’m not familiar — is that a man or a woman?).

Now, Hilton has fired some additional shots by amplifying a new movement (viva la revolución!) called Justice For Bionic (see the graphic above), encouraging true lovers of music to hit retailers on November 11 not to purchase Gaga’s ARTPOP but instead, to buy Christina Aguilera’s much-derided 2010 LP Bionic. #JusticeForBionic is currently picking up steam on Twitter, although at press time, it has yet to overtake other trending topics such as “#piştthaditakipleşelim.”

For me, this elevates the diva warfare of Gaga’s “Applause” vs. Katy Perry’s “Roar” to dazzling new heights; there’s something wonderfully out-of-touch about introducing a three-year-old Christina Aguilera album into the mix.

It feels perfectly in keeping with the dire conditions within fan culture: There remains wildly disproportionate enthusiasm for an artist like Aguilera, whose commercial relevance is increasingly dubious even as her status as an icon among her own fans grows ever clearer, while on the opposing side, the virulence of dialogue among Gaga’s fans has reached such an epic scale that she’s forced to release a statement about their propensity for hate speech.

All of that is compounded by everyone’s hysterically distorted sense of fairness and entitlement, whether it’s Gaga (however unintentionally) playing fast and loose with the chart rules while her fans tell the haters to kill themselves, or Aguilera claiming in interviews that Bionic was before-its-time and misunderstood while her fans’ certitude that Bionic deserved a better shake than it got grows ever-stronger.

Here’s the tricky part: Both artists are hugely talented performers who have had extraordinary successes, but they’ve also both had pretty significant blunders. In short? It’s a war out there in the pop trenches. Next year, let’s trend #JusticeForLotus.