Christina Aguilera

A four-octave range is the first fact anyone offers about Christina Aguilera, and it has been both her asset and her problem. The voice is large enough to flatten a song, and her best records are the ones where she decides what to do with it instead of proving she can. She came out of the Mickey Mouse Club cast, and her 1999 debut made her a teen-pop star in the same wave as everyone else who was on that show.

Stripped, in 2002, was the break. Longer, angrier and more explicit than the debut, it made her a target for years of commentary about how a young woman should present herself, and it is still the record her reputation rests on. Back to Basics followed in 2006 with big-band brass and a real feel for pre-rock pop. Bionic went hard into electro in 2010 and did not land. Lotus in 2012 was the reset. Her Grammy shelf spans pop vocal and Latin categories, including a Latin Grammy for a traditional pop album, and the continual reinvention of image and sound is the through line critics keep returning to.

Screen work has been a sideline she keeps coming back to. Burlesque in 2010 gave her the lead as Ali Rose in a film built entirely around the voice and not much else. She played Jade St. John on Nashville, voiced parts in Shark Tale and The Emoji Movie, turned up as herself in Get Him to the Greek and Shine a Light, and spent seasons as a coach on The Voice, which is the role that reintroduced her to an audience that had stopped buying albums.