Christina Aguilera is gearing up for the release of Liberation, her first new album in six years. She's been doing the rounds to promote the album, from a turn with James Corden on Carpool Karaoke to a gorgeous bare-faced photo spread with Paper Magazine. Most recently, the singer did an interview with W Magazine, and the details she revealed, especially about her stint as a judge on The Voice, are pretty surprising.
In 2011, Aguilera was of the NBC show's original judges, along with Adam Levine, Cee Lo Green, and Blake Shelton. And while things started off well, they soon turned sour, she told the magazine:
"And then I felt like things really started to shift and change. I signed on to a show where the blind audition element was something interesting, something genuine. After a while, though, you start to see that everyone is good-looking.
It wasn't a comfortable place for me to be, where I'm just part of a money-making machine. When I stop believing in something, then it's like, What am I doing here? I think I did choose to, no pun intended, take a chair for so long and do something very commercial for my little ones. But at a certain point I felt like I'm not even doing them a service by cheating myself and what I'm here to do. They should be seeing Mommy live her best life."
Aguilera decided to leave the show in 2016, but not without some controversy. Some fans thought that she left because the burgeoning romance between Blake Shelton and new judge Gwen Stefani got too much attention, but Aguilera laughed off any feud rumors. "Oh my God, no!" she said. "No, it never had anything to do with any one person at all. And I actually think it's really cute Blake and Gwen found love in that chaotic environment."
She also said she fought for a gender balance on the judges' panel. "I fought for a long time to get two females in the chairs. And, for a long time, I was just told it wasn't the demographic," she said. "But just know that I was a fighter behind the scenes."
While it's disheartening to hear of Aguilera's time on the show, she said her time on the show gave her the push to re-enter the music world. She said,"Once again, I found myself in that place where I'm being told what to do, what's going to be acceptable or unacceptable, what's okay or not okay," she said. "It's like, God, you know, I'm a mother of two now. The genie is out of the bottle."
