Christina Aguilera is one of those all-time classic artists. Most people will recognise her name, and if they don’t, they’ll likely recognise at least one of her songs. From her emergence as a teen star in the late 1990s, topping charts all over the world with the likes of ‘Genie in a Bottle’ and ‘What a Girl Wants’, through the era-defining success of songs such as ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Dirrty’, to her current position as one of the biggest-selling and most influential female artists of this century, Aguilera has never been anything less than successful.
Born in New York City in 1980, Aguilera first stepped into the public eye as a cast member of the Disney Channel’s Mickey Mouse Club (a legendary breeding ground for future stars such as Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Justin Timberlake). After a brief spell as a teen star in Japan, she returned to the States and hit the big time when her summer 1999 single, ‘Genie in a Bottle’ became a worldwide smash hit, topping the charts in the States, the UK, Canada, and Australia.
For the next few years, Aguilera was a young teen star, enjoying another global hit with a cover of ‘Lady Marmalade’ from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. She shattered her teen-pop image with her explosive 2002 single, ‘Dirrty’ but followed it up with ‘Beautiful’, an all-time-classic ballad that topped charts everywhere, remains an anthem for the LGBTQ community, and has gone down as one of the great songs of the 2000s. Her 2022 album, Aguilera, was recorded entirely in Spanish and won that year’s Latin Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album proving that she is still as vital now as she has ever been.
