Christina's high hopes

TORONTO (CP) -- Christina Aguilera has just taken a crash course in fame. Apparently, she has passed with honours. In just under a year, the pop singer has sold six million records, taken a Grammy Award for best new artist (beating Spears and favourite Macy Gray) and made dozens of international TV appearances.

Her name is cited alongside the trendiest of the trendy: Britney Spears, Eminem, Fred Durst, N'Sync. If magazine covers are a measure of success, Aguilera has certainly joined the big time: in July she graced the front of Rolling Stone just two months after Spears.

"It is a crazy ride," the tiny (she'd be lucky to hit 100 pounds soaking wet wearing a parka) 19-year-old said in an interview.

"I think you grow up quicker, definitely. I was 17 when I came aboard to start recording the record and then once the ball starts rolling you learn even quicker."

For someone so young, Aguilera has handled the rocket ride to fame with a surprising amount of grace and maturity. Unlike so many of her pop peers she thinks before she speaks and is, by comparison, very articulate. She was always, she explains, mentally prepared for the fame thing. Achieving it has been only the first step.

"For some people it probably wouldn't be a good thing," she says.

"For me -- I think everyone has a purpose and this was definitely what I was meant to do. I've dreamt about this since I was in diapers, it's not that last year I decided 'Hey, I'd like to sing. It's kind of a hobby, let's try this' and it just happened -- this is something I really worked for."

Where Spears triumphed with a wholesome, bland, girl-next-door sexuality, Aguilera has been more of a "bad girl," speaking her mind and even unflinchingly engaging in a war of words with rapper Eminem that became somewhat nasty, at least on his part. She's no rock 'n' roll hell-raiser, to be sure: her management and label are far too aware that her audience is still very, very young to permit that.

Nor does she herself want to carry it that far. She's cautious when talk of Spears, her natural rival in the pop world, inevitably comes up.

"I think she's really great at what she does and I have to give the girl credit for working her butt off, but it's like you know it can be too much," Aguilera says of media hype about the supposed competition between the two. "People are always trying to start stuff like that. It was always just a matter of time," she says, dismissing the issue with a shrug.

She's far too driven towards as-yet-unrealized goals to start a turf war with Spears, whom she knows only too well after appearing with her in the 1993 cast of TV's Mickey Mouse Club. All the same, when Aguilera wants to talk about what has passed and what's to come in her own career, even then it's hard to resist a subtle dig at Spears. After all, Aguilera defeated her at the Grammys, a fact that critics and industry people alike ascribed to Aguilera's superior vocal talent.

"That was a really surreal moment for me, completely unexpected, no speech prepared, nothing. So I was just shocked. I was the newcomer of the newcomers, my album had been around the least time, I had been around the least time," she says.

"I guess it showed that the Grammys wasn't just a bunch of bunk, that they do pay attention -- I mean they'd have to in order to know I was there," she says.

"If you were going by statistics or record sales, it would have been someone else." Spears, in other words. It's understandable that someone with Aguilera's ambition would need to fuel her ego, even just a little bit, with such talk. Spears is undoubtedly the world's hottest entertainment commodity, at least for the moment. Aguilera wants to last, to have a career and not simply a moment in Spears' considerable shadow.

"I think if you have any vision for yourself, knowing you want longevity, you want to get into different areas in the business that you want to explore and be a versatile performer in general," she says.

She studies her idols, strong female entertainers like Madonna and Janet Jackson, who have been able to do the studio, the stage and the screen. She has made a Christmas record that "allows me to explore my soulful, bluesy side and my influences" on which she will receive producer credits. She will make a Latin album (she's half Ecuadoran). Clearly, the Aguilera plan has not been fulfilled by a long shot.

"That's why I focused even harder to get my point across to people who are 20 years my senior at the (record) label who didn't really want to listen to a 17-year-old," she says.

"Of course I don't have the experience to back it up, but I think my skills have been sharpened over the last year."

There seems no room for regret in Aguilera's busy day. The loss of a "normal" teenage experience is nothing more than a passing thought. No senior prom, no hanging out at the mall, no final exams -- no big deal.

"I can't look at it like 'I don't get to do what my peers did.'" she says. "Because in turn, they didn't get to do what I did. Everybody has their own path and I just have to follow my heart and love what I do and basically this is it.

"If I didn't do it, I would have been sitting at my school desk, looking out the window going: 'God, what would have happened if I had gotten on that plane and went to pursue my dream?

"This is the decision I've made, singing is everything to me, my form of release, my form of expression and my love in general. It's my whole world."