Rolling Stone (Feb. 16th 2012)

Three Men And A Diva

[edited version]

The (friendly) battle of the sexes that drives 'The Voice/ TV's most exciting music show

At its heart, "The Voice" is a game show, and the most essential rules that guide its coaches are unspoken: Try not to wince when blind auditions trick you into picking an unsightly singer; always declare it "heartbreaking" to choose the winner of a vocal battle, no matter how easy the decision actually is; and most important, never, ever interrupt Christina Aguilera when she is speaking. One late afternoon in a quiet backroom of a Los Angeles photo studio, Aguilera is curled up, barefoot, on a white couch next to fellow coaches Adam Levine and Blake Shelton. She's sipping an iced coffee and holding forth on the greatness of the team of singers she's assembled for The Voice's second season, which begins February 5th in a prime post-Super Bowl slot: "In one of my battles," she says, "this girl and guy are doing Nirvana's 'HeartShaped Box,' and I'm not sure if people would even expect that from me. . . ." 

At that, Cee Lo Green - who's been splayed diagonally in a leather chair off to the side, in deep communion with the ceiling - snaps to attention and begins singing Kurt Cobain's melody in his high voice: "Hey, wait/I've got a new complaint. . . ."

Aguilera flares up like a sexy puffer fish, swiveling her bleach-blond head in his direction, red lips pursed, blue eyes blazing with imperial annoyance. "Yes, Cee Lo," she says, as if she's talking to her four-year old son. "This is my floor here!"

He stops singing, and Aguilera laughs, already over it: 'You wake him up and now he's interrupting everybody's shit!"

The unlikely stars of The Voice - last season's highest-rated NBC entertainment show - have a surprisingly warm offcamera rapport for four people who have no real business being in a room together. "Just look at the four of us," says Levine. "It's just so wrong and so amazing."

As widespread gossip would have it, the other three supposedly resent Aguilera for various alleged sins, including tardiness, imperiousness and earning more money than them - but there's not much evidence ofthat today. " 'Supposedly' is the key word," Aguilera says, with a big laugh. Levine and Shelton just attended Aguilera's 31st birthday party at a Hollywood bowling alley; Cee Lo skipped it only because he was out of town.

They spend a lot of time teasing one another. Oklahoma native Shelton - a singer with 10 Number One country hits to his name but little recognition outside his genre before The Voice debuted last April - is a frequent target of hick jokes. Shelton, 35, has been on an Eighties kick lately, so he plays Young MC's "Bust a Move" on his iPhone's tinny speakers. Says Levine, "Blake thinks this song came out two weeks ago." But they're also jealous of his cowboy cool: "Blake can say anything or do anything," Levine adds. "IfI was like, Tm drunk at 4:00!' I'd be attacked. He's like, 'It's cool, fuck you, I just shot a fucking moose, kiss my ass!' He can say whatever he wants."

Cee Lo, 37, is the designated oddball, the ruler and sole inhabitant of what Shelton calls "Cee Lo Land." At the moment, he's wearing a black tank top and long black shorts, plus sandals over white socks. "He can wear white socks with sandals and still have it be fucking cool," says Levine. "If I did that, Blake would make fun of me."

If Aguilera occasionally has to go full diva, on-camera or off-, she sees it as the only way to hold her own. "You have to be a pretty strong girl to stay up in the mix with the guys," she says. "It's a lot. It's a crazy locker-room kind of situation."

Levine, his tattooed, yoga-toned arms exposed by a sleeveless shirt, turns to Aguilera. "I honestly just recently started realizing that you're surrounded by three dudes all the time, and that has to be something of a pain in the ass," he says. But they've made some concessions: "We stopped farting in front of her!"

Aguilera rolls her eyes: "You had a nasty burp at the Super Bowl commercial, though."

Besides onions, tomatoes and marijuana, the Netherlands' biggest cash crop may well be reality shows. Big Brother and Fear Factor both started there before spreading around the world, and in 2010, the creator of those shows, the very wealthy John de Mol, introduced another one: The Voice of Holland. He was convinced that the American Idol/X Factor formula was played out. Says de Mol, "The trick that worked for many years - a professional jury killing a totally untalented 16-year-old boy with braces who thinks he is Michael Jackson - started to show weak spots because people foresaw the tricks and the structure."

Instead, he had a team of producers spend more than a year developing new tricks, chief among them a now-famous audition process: Coaches sit in red chairs with their backs to auditioning singers, turning around at the press of a button when they're impressed. They also eliminated the William Hung element entirely, instead drawing from a solidly talented pool of contestants, including referrals from Universal Music Group talent scouts. The other twist never fails to make compelling TV: When more than one coach wants a contestant for their team, the power dynamic shifts, with rich and famous coaches forced to supplicate themselves before an unknown. 

The American Voice is almost identical to the Dutch version, albeit with coaches more internationally famous than the likes of Angela Groothuizen and Roel van Velzen. But it could have been a different show altogether: Reality auteur Mark Burnett had been working on his own idea for a competition, where celebrity coaches would also have fielded teams of singers, when Paul Telegdy, president of NEC's alternative and late-night programming, brought The Voice of Holland to his attention. 

They decided to drop their own idea and instead try to import The Voice - and while CBS also had interest in the show, de Mol was more inclined to go with NBC, which has been mired in fourth place among broadcast networks. "NBC was not the first network you would think of," says de Mol. "But I felt NBC was the right place because they needed a hit so badly, so they would give it support." NBC got it - and gave Burnett just four months to find judges, assemble a production team and put it on the air.

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For a woman who once strutted in backless leather chaps (in the "Dirrty" video, which Cee Lo shamefacedly counts as a favorite), Aguilera can be unexpectedly vulnerable. She likes that The Voice shows "a softer side" of her - and it's done the same off-camera. She was chatting with Shelton at an after-show party at his house last season when she suddenly said to him, "I don't think you like me." Shelton called over his wife, singer Miranda Lambert, who revealed that Shelton's birthday gift a couple of years back was an autographed Aguilera tour book. "She's my favorite female vocalist," says Shelton (who also admits to having had a "major crush" on her - he had even designated her as a marital "free pass," never expecting to meet her). "I told Christina that, and I'll never forget the look on her face. Of course, knowing Christina now, 'probably somebody that works for her signed that autograph."