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    "headline": "A 13-year-old’s 2019 Voice Kids UK audition of Lauryn Hill’s Ex-Factor is trending again",
    "description": "The Voice Kids UK reposted Charley Jones's three-chair Ex-Factor audition on October 25. It comes from Jessie J's only series, in 2019, and the song itself is built on a Wu-Tang Clan replay.",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-27T10:23:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Ex-Factor, Jessie J, Lauryn Hill, The Voice Kids UK",
    "articleBody": "The Voice Kids UK put a 4-minute-53-second clip of 13-year-old Charley Jones, from South Wales, singing Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor” on its official YouTube channel on Sunday, October 25, and it passed 230,000 views inside two days. Three coaches turned for her, will.i.am, Jessie J and Danny Jones, and she picked Team Jessie. The performance is not from this year. Jessie J sat on the British children’s panel for exactly one series, the third, which aired on ITV in 2019, and the upload’s own tags label it “The Voice Kids UK 2019” and “Voice Kids Series 3.” The show has made no new episodes since its seventh series ended in July 2023, so the channel keeps feeding the audience from its archive, as it did with the Faith audition by the Nyandoro twins earlier this month. A hip hop record hiding inside a soul ballad The more interesting question is why a 13-year-old reached for this song at all. “Ex-Factor” was the second single from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, released to US radio on December 14, 1998, through Ruffhouse and Columbia. Hill wrote and produced it herself. Its bones come from hip hop: the track replays parts of Wu-Tang Clan’s “Can It Be All So Simple,” a track that had itself sampled Gladys Knight & the Pips covering “The Way We Were.” That chain is why the Wu-Tang members and the Streisand ballad’s writers, Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Marvin Hamlisch, now share the songwriting credit with Hill. Put the dates side by side and the gap is wide. The single was a little over 20 years old when Charley sang it in front of the coaches in 2019, and it is nearly 28 years old as the clip trends in October 2026. In other words, the song had been in circulation for roughly seven years before she was even born, judging by the age the show gave for her. It never went away, which helps explain the choice. A short timeline of its afterlife: 1999: peaks at No. 21 on the US Hot 100 in April and No. 7 on the R&B and hip hop songs chart; reaches No. 4 in the UK, still Hill’s biggest British hit. 2012 to 2014: sampled by Lil B, Kehlani and Omarion. 2018: Drake builds “Nice for What” on it, and Cardi B borrows its lines for “Be Careful.” Live covers: Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson, John Legend and H.E.R. have all sung it on stage. The parent album carries its own weight. Miseducation opened at No. 1 in the US with close to 423,000 copies in its first week, then a record for a woman, and won five of its 10 nominations at the 41st Grammy Awards, including album of the year, the first time a hip hop artist took that prize, according to the Recording Academy. It remains Hill’s only solo studio album. For anyone who was a child in 2018, Drake’s hit is as likely a doorway as the original, and both routes end at the same 1998 record. What the clip gets right, and what it leaves out As a piece of television the audition works. The three turns came on a song whose chorus leans on soaring harmonies, a risky pick for a blind round where the coaches can judge only the voice. Jessie J was the obvious pick for a singer of this style: she had coached the adult version in its first series, and her chair in 2019 sat in the same position, beside will.i.am. Pixie Lott, the fourth coach that year, did not turn. The packaging is weaker. The headline sells “a 90s soul star,” which flattens a carefully written breakup song into a decade costume. The upload opens with a vlog of her big day with her mum and nan before any singing starts. Most importantly, nothing in the title or description tells a viewer the footage is seven years old. The standard text under the video even names a different coaching lineup, will.i.am, Pixie Lott, Danny Jones and Ronan Keating, that never sat together with Jessie J. Viewers arriving from a feed could fairly assume this is a new series, and it is not. The clip also stops at the team choice. Series 3 ran on to battles, a semi-final in which each coach kept three singers, and a final won by Sam Wilkinson for Team Danny. The upload does not follow Charley past her blind audition, so neither do we. Across its seven series, from June 2017 to July 2023, the format took singers aged 7 to 14, and no eighth series has aired. For now the archive is the show, and on this channel’s count, Charley’s 2019 “Ex-Factor” had been watched more than 230,000 times by Tuesday morning, October 27. Further reading Wikipedia: Ex-Factor Wikipedia: The Voice Kids (British TV series) Image: Justin Higuchi from Los Angeles, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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