Christina Aguilera is “really proud” of the “risks and opportunities” she has taken over the course of her 25-year career in the music industry, regardless of how they are received by audiences.
In a recent interview with Paper In an interview with the magazine, the pop icon spoke about the thoughtful decisions behind each of her projects over the years, noting that she never released anything just for “noise” and “attention.” This included her song “Dirrty” from her 2002 album Moved outin which she discovered her sexual side, a big change from her 1999 debut album of the same name.
“You can make those choices. You can make them to play it safe and go with the flow, or you can do things that really move and shake people up,” she explained. “And I don’t do that intentionally. I think it’s cheesy to intentionally do things for pop culture, for noise, for attention, to stay ‘relevant,’ so to speak. That becomes its own weird beast that moves away from art, period.”
The “Genie In A Bottle” singer continued: “So you can be a pop artist and really do what you do and still communicate messages and change it. I’ve never had any interest in making the same record over and over again, that’s my worst idea of music. It’s part of our job as musicians to see where the music is going and what’s happening socially. It’s really about making connections and trying to bring people together.”
For Aguilera, art means “wanting to experiment and not wanting to stay the same,” which is why she described her 2010 album Bionic as an “adventurous album”, while the 2006 album Back to basics was “somewhat more understandable”.
“I have to feel strong in my message and my core and what I’m doing out there,” said the Grammy winner. “I think it’s been obvious throughout my career that I’ve taken risks and chances. It’s very easy to play it safe to protect the public perception, to make them feel safe. People are comfortable with what they know, and when you give them a change of script and your own sound – which I’ve done intentionally with every record – they want to explore, experiment and not stay the same. I didn’t want to be a one-dimensional balladeer, I didn’t want to be known for one particular thing.”
