Search for more Christina Aguilera!!

Hungersearch.com!

Christina Aguilera is holed up in a hotel room in Los Angeles - just a girl, a telephone, and a gaggle of handlers carving up the day into 10-minute chunks of conversation with strangers. ''Oh, I don't mind,'' says the audibly wilted but unfailingly polite 19-year-old about the rigors of the press circuit. Aguilera's sudden, massive stardom is, after all, something she's been aiming for since she made her national television debut on ''Star Search'' at age 9.

Only six months ago, Aguilera was a lesser-known teen singer, one more ''Mickey Mouse Club'' alumna who had won attention for her lovely rendering of ''Reflection'' on the ''Mulan'' soundtrack. Then last summer ''Genie in a Bottle,'' the first single from her debut, which has since sold 5 million copies, came out. It catapulted Aguilera to the top of the Billboard charts, where the single lodged for five weeks. Her new single, ''What a Girl Wants,'' just knocked Santana's ''Smooth'' out of the top spot. And the crowning achievement of a whirlwind half-year came last week when Aguilera was nominated for two Grammys: best new artist and best female pop vocal. She performs at the FleetCenter on Thursday, with fellow Grammy nominees TLC.

''I am so thrilled,'' she says of the nominations, and despite her weariness - Aguilera is speaking in a voice as small as her singing is large - it's clear she's not just paying lip service. ''I had no idea. People around me were saying it would happen, but I'd only had one single out. I was not expecting this at all.''

She has, however, been greasing the wheels for most of her life. Born on Staten Island and raised near Pittsburgh by her mother and grandmother after her parents split up, Aguilera listened incessantly to her favorite singers, ''the great vocalists'' as she calls them: Etta James, Billie Holiday, Barbra Streisand, and contemporary powerhouses Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. As a precocious grade-schooler she was in demand as a National Anthem performer at professional sporting events in and around Pittsburgh. At 12, Aguilera went to Orlando to join the cast of ''The Mickey Mouse Club.'' High-powered manager Steve Kurtz discovered her as a Mouseketeer (alongside Britney Spears, Keri Russell, and members of 'N Sync) and offered to shepherd her career. In 1998, in a remarkable display of faith in an untested artist, RCA signed her to a seven-album contract. Aguilera was 17.

She didn't want to release ''Genie in a Bottle'' as a single. ''Hearing that song in the first stages, it didn't let me go places vocally. It sounded very Top 40 to me, very pop-driven, all about a cool hook and melody. It fit too much into what was going on in pop, and I wanted to be different. I never wanted to be a straight pop singer.'' Indeed, the rest of the album is filled with songs that display her striking range and power as a singer of R&B, pop-soul, and ballads.

Yet she is being positioned as a teen pinup (undoubtedly part of RCA's plan to maximize the return on its hefty investment), and she knows it. ''This one is the most pop-sounding album I will ever do,'' declares Aguilera, who says that blues is her number one favorite style. ''I definitely want to take it to the next level.''

She plans to record ''At Last,'' an Etta James tune, for a hidden track on her sophomore CD and is eager to start writing herself.

''We got songs from some great writers for this album,'' Aguilera says, including hitmeister Diane Warren, who is already on board for the next album. ''But I want to write more about experiences I've gone through. I've gone through bad situations. I come from a divorced home. I've been around abuse. I've lived a different life, been on the outside.''

Friends, Aguilera says, resented her success and were in short supply as her career blossomed. ''But I turned negative situations into positives by putting all my focus and energy into music. I was always a deep thinker, an introverted person, to the point where music was an escape.''

In the spring, Aguilera will release a Spanish-language CD. Her father, with whom she has no contact, is Ecuadoran, and Aguilera wants to rediscover her Latin roots. Also, ''it makes my grandparents happy,'' she says.

Although it's not her intention, that album should help distinguish Aguilera from the bevy of teen sensations who appeared on the scene last year: Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Mandy Moore - all blond teenagers with dance-pop records. It's a phenomenon that Aguilera accepts, but it's still disconcerting to her.

''It's so weird that we all came out at the same time, and yeah, it's a little frustrating to constantly get compared. We're all so very different,'' she says, careful to point out in well-rehearsed tones that ''it doesn't take away from what I think of them. They're all so talented.''

More accurately, Aguilera is so very different - far and away the most gifted vocalist of the bunch. ''People,'' she says, ''will see [the differences] as time goes on.''

Meanwhile, she is busy learning to navigate a world where ''everyone wants a piece of you. Good and bad. They either want to put you down or talk to you. All these people are pulling, just pulling on you.''

She's constantly on the road. And as for dating?

''No time,'' Aguilera says. ''It's sort of sad. I see these gorgeous guys in the audience and would love to get to know them. But I'm off to the next airplane.''

Still, like any red-blooded teenager, she is prone to crushes. Her latest? Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst. But with a schedule as hectic as hers, Aguilera says, ''I'm lucky if I get to see a movie. Alone.''