Christina Aguilera is “really proud” of the “risks and opportunities” she's taken throughout her 25-year career in the music industry, regardless of how they were received by the public.
In a recent interview with Paper magazine, the pop icon spoke about the thoughtful decisions behind each of her projects over the years, noting that she has never released anything just for “noise” and “attention.” That included her song “Dirrty” from her 2002 album Strippedwhich saw her embrace her sexual side, a radical departure from her 1999 self-titled debut album.
“You can make these choices. You can make them to play it safe and go with the flow, or you can make things that really move people and shake them up,” he explained. “And I don't do it intentionally, I think it's trivial to do things intentionally for pop culture and noise and to keep the attention in quotes 'relevant.' That becomes a strange animal that distances itself from art, period.”
The “Genie In A Bottle” singer continued, “So you can be a pop artist and genuinely do what you do, and still come up with messages and change them. I've never been interested 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 music is going and see what's happening socially. It's really about connecting and trying to bring people together.”
For Aguilera, art is about “wanting to experiment and not wanting to stay the same,” which is how she described her 2010 album Bionic as “an adventurous album”, while the 2006 one Back to the origins it was “a little more recognizable.”
“I have to feel strong in my message, in my core, and in what I'm doing out there,” the Grammy-winning artist said. “I think it's been evident throughout my career that I've taken risks and chances. It's very easy to play it safe for the audience's perspective, so they feel safe. People are comfortable with what they know, and when you change the script and change your sound, which I've done on purpose with every record, they want to explore, they want to experiment, and they don't want to stay the same. I didn't want to be a one-dimensional ballad singer, I didn't want to be known for one specific thing.”