The Singles Jukebox

Words can’t bring you down, but your scores on the other hand…

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[3.43]

Claire Biddles: A careful, intimate beginning with uncharacteristically unshowy vocals hints at a reflective sequel to “Beautiful”, but I’m out when the we-are-the-world platitudes come in. Christina is more believable as a harbinger of empowerment when it’s interpersonal rather than universal; when she’s urging you to change your attitude towards yourself, rather than calling for a wishy-washy we’re-all-the-same-inside hand-hold.
[3]

Ryo Miyauchi: Christina sticks two different songs into one, loosely connected by the chorus. She goes more for song #2, an inspirational ballad. Despite her intentions, it doesn’t add much of her lived-in experience to the wisdom handed down from her role models. But song #1, her reflection of her youth, could’ve went somewhere more rewarding, maybe like her take on Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me.” She barely gets to setting it up, only to abandon it to reach somewhere else.
[4]

Juana Giaimo: The fact that such a mainstream artist like Christina Aguilera decided to dedicate this song to the victims of the Orlando shooting is meaningful. While I don’t tend to enjoy her music, I do appreciate how she controls her voice in “Change”. In the verses, she sings quietly and only grows in the chorus, when she sees hope in a brighter future. 
[6]

Anthony Easton: Appropriating the formal mechanics of alleviating black suffering, but with the heartbreak replaced with too much melisma and a superfluous reference to love being love, which might have been radical when Garth Brooks used the language 30 years ago.
[0]

Cassy Gress: Christina Aguilera appears to have released a black gospel song in which she put the entire gospel choir at the bottom of a well and let their flanged voices drift up behind her fine-grit sandpaper belting. Because in a time where people keep murdering black people, the most important thing is not that we listen to the black people, right? Much more important to listen to hackneyed aphorisms and cheap synthesizer French horns.
[2]

Brad Shoup: Given enough time, someone was going to run a CTRL+F on their purchased songs and find “A Change Is Gonna Come” right by “Waiting on the World to Change”. There are some remarkable tones in the upper range, like snowglobe ambulances. And I do enjoy the French horn part, even if it’s just as backgrounded. But Aguilera’s perspective is foregrounded, and if I wanted that approach I’d listen to hardcore.
[4]

Hannah Jocelyn: I love that high Dessner drone in the background, and the jumpy time signature is definitely a plus, but the song as whole is unnecessarily compressed and never really becomes the anthem it wants to be. The sentiment makes me wish it did.
[5]