Christina Aguilera was going through a rebellious phase when she released "Dirrty," the lead single from her album
Stripped. As a tween, she logged two seasons on
The Mickey Mouse Club, then at 18 released her self-titled debut album, with the wholesome hits "
Genie in a Bottle" and "
What a Girl Wants." Leading up to her
Stripped album, she suffered a breakdown and wanted to take more control of her career. "Dirrty," released when she was 21, was her way of firebombing her Disney image.
The song is a hip-hop-inflected party tune where Aguilera sings about getting unruly and sweating till her clothes come off. It was clear that Aguilera's
Mickey Mouse Club years were well behind her.
The video is very raunchy and sexually explicit. It features Aguilera in some kind of underworld wearing very little clothing. In one scene, she wins a fight, and in another she dances suggestively in a shower.
The clip's director, David LaChapelle, transformed an abandoned newspaper print building in Los Angeles into a seedy underground club that conjured all the connotations of the word dirty - "A place your parents don't want you to go," he noted in MTV's Making The Video.
Although he's helmed many music videos for a variety of artists - including Elton John, Mariah Carey, and Jennifer Lopez - he's better known as a photographer to the stars. A couple years before he directed the scantily-clad Aguilera, he snapped her in the TRL Grammy Class Of 2000 photoshoot. When he showed interest in directing the "Dirrty" clip, it took some convincing to get the gig.
"Christina wasn't sure a photographer would give enough of a dirty departure for her," he told Billboard in 2018. "But I really wanted to and had to get her feel confident with me."
The rapper Redman joins Aguilera on this track with a verse where he lands references to Bernie Mac, Dennis Rodman and ODB. He wrote and produced the song along with Aguilera, Balewa Muhammad, Jasper Cameron, Reggie Noble and Rockwilder.
The extra "R" in the title is intentional. Nelly did the same thing earlier in the year on his hit "
Hot In Herre" and the rapper Chingy did it in 2003 on "Right Thurr." The bonus letter is supposed to emphasize the title, not just screw up our spell-checker.
Shortly after the video came out, Tina Fey said on Saturday Night Live that it "Gave her television genital warts."
In the boxing ring scene of the video, there are posters promoting the sex industry in Thailand. Written in Thai, they read, "Thailand's Sex Tourism" and "Young Underage Girls." The Thai TV stations banned the video and the government asked for an apology, which they got from the video's director, David LaChapelle, who claimed he had no idea what the posters said and had no intention of offending the people of Thailand.
The song didn't get a lot of radio play, but the video did very well. It was #1 on MTV's Total Request Live, and most likely responsible for sending more than one adolescent directly through puberty.
Aguilera cleaned up for her next single, "
Beautiful," a vulnerable ballad that gives us a good look at how she was feeling around this time. Her next album,
Back To Basics, didn't appear until 2006, the year after she got married.
The final scene Aguilera shot for the video was just supposed to be her and the girls splashing around a bit in the water, but choreographer Jeri Slaughter convinced LaChapelle to incorporate the dance moves.
"And I actually asked David, 'Can we please do the choreography in the water?' Everybody was like, 'Wait, what?'" she told Billboard. "I told Christina, 'Trust me. When you're rolling on the floor and you're slapping the ground with the booty pop, you're gonna smack the water. And that's gonna give it a really cool effect.' And so we did that and then the girls just went with it. It wasn't really like this, like, 'Oh, all these girls in shower' - it was just such a freeing kind of open experience that they just didn't care who was watching or what they were doing. It was just like, 'Let's just have fun in the water.' And it was difficult because you already have like a foot of water that you’re trying to like splash around and move within it."
The reaction to Aguilera's sexy new image in the racy video threatened to upstage her artistry, so LaChapelle took a simpler approach when he worked with her again on "The Voice With In," opting for a one take, black-and-white clip that placed the emphasis on her voice.
In the 2022 "Dirrty Thirty" episode of the sitcom How I Met Your Father, the theme of Sophie (Hilary Duff)'s 30th birthday party is based on this song and its video.
Aguilera took boxing lessons to prepare for her fight scene in the video, which taught her how to throw a punch a little too well - she accidentally knocked out her opponent for real!
