How do you really feel, Christina Aguilera?
Earlier this month, the "Accelerate" singer announced she was done with NBC's The Voice forever. In an interview with W magazine, published today, Aguilera said it felt like "such a hamster wheel" after doing six seasons with CeeLo Green, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton.
Over time, she explained, "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," the pop music superstar said with a laugh. "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 last appeared on The Voice in 2016, but she did not leave due to Shelton's budding romance with Gwen Stefani, one of the newer coaches. "Oh my God, no!" she said of her alleged feud with the No Doubt singer. "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."
"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," Aguilera adds. "But just know that I was a fighter behind the scenes."
Aguilera said her final seasons on The Voice reminded her of an earlier period in her career, just before she released her sophomore album, Stripped, and shed her more commercial "Genie in a Bottle" image. "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 OK or not OK," she said. "It's like, God, you know, I'm a mother of two now." In other words, get ready: "The genie is out of the bottle."
(E! and NBC are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)