Real Music: Christina Aguilera

"We take it back to real music and a time before there was any such thing as an MTV or any way to show an artist through video or internet or packaging,"
"It's definitely about going back to old music where you wanted to buy it or listen to it on the radio purely from what sounds good on your ears, something that moves you." 

The above quotes, from a recent interview, demonstrate Christina Aguilera first harking back to a completely imaginary prelapsarian past, just as Jessie J and Sandi Thom have done to bewildering levels of success in the past few years, and then genuinely believing that nowadays The General Public are completely incapable of enjoying music without prejudice (perhaps she's just trying to rationalise her recent failure to sell many records).

But what is she talking about?  More pertinently, why do the press still care about what she thinks?  The answer to both questions: she has a new TV show.

Its name is 'The Voice' and is another search for a star type affair from the US. Given her apparent yearning for ye olde days of yore, it may be presumed that the show would differ vastly from its competitors, the likes of American Idol and America's Got Talent.  One could reasonably expect, for example, that 'The Voice' would have no website, be the subject of no large advertising campaign and, for that extra touch of authenticity, have no visual element whatsoever.  Unfortunately, what with it being a major American TV programme in 2011, it has all three.

But fear not Real Music fans - there is one important difference.  The main gimmick is that the four judges - Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine and Some Country Singer - don't get to see the auditionees while they perform, instead sitting with their backs turned to them in huge red swivel chairs.  If they like what they hear, they spin around and in a cross between Dragons' Den and The X Factor attempt to persuade them to join their 'team', all the while pretending not to be disappointed that the angelic voice they have just enjoyed has turned out to belong to a man who looks like some kind of Shane McGowan-Mark E Smith-pig hybrid.

For a woman so in debt to MTV, video, the internet and 'packaging' for the success she has had, Aguilera is being more than a mite hypocritical here, perhaps even ungrateful.  The overall objectionableness of her sentiments can by summed up by those two little words: Real Music.

Accordingly, Christina Aguilera is the second person to be added to The Real Music Wall Of Shame.  Well done everybody.