ok i watched the adele special with my gf, and have been listening to the new album with my daughter (yes, it's true, they are both named jane. my view is this: if you were to date somebody because she had the same name as your daughter, that would be strange and disturbing. on the other hand, it would be sad to eliminate someone on account of a name, for the rose is sweet. however, i also have janes as an ex-mother-in-law and an aunt. it's like an infestation! of beautiful flowers.)
in one way adele's appeal is easy to account for, or at least describe: she is old-fashioned universal pop star, like say dionne warwick or diana ross or barbra streisand or whitney or bruce. she reminds us of a time when like everyone, or at least all sort-of middleclass middlebrow people, were listening to the same thing, or before the audience fragmented even more than it had already. actually the history goes like this: the popular music audience was pretty fragmented in, say the 1940s and 50s, what with race records and hillbilly records and novelty records and double entendre and super-wholesome pop. then it coalesced in the fifties and sixties to some extent. then maybe started to fragment again in the '90s. i'd like to see it as fragmentary as possible, asamatteroffact. i'm going to say that i prefer genre, for whatever reason. i'll seek out the corners of country, hip hop, reggae, punk, cajun, and so on; i find that interesting on cultural and intercultural grounds as well as finding the music more powerful and sincere. but that's just me.
but adele can be listened to by several generations, all regions, etc., though the audience might be a wee bit gendered. but few or perhaps no other artists have audiences of that scope; she becomes an instant touchstone; we will always associate her songs with certain moments in this decade. grandma is not going to listen even to taylor except under coercion. her big special on network tv is really like what american entertainment was like in 1972, unless you got a little off the beaten path, like a peggy lee christmas special.
the material has both obvious appeal and an underlying banality, i must say, and i also am just going to say i don't much like the new album, although the biggest pop hit ever 'hello' is pretty irresistible. maybe that's the only cut i would drive to #1, though. there's a lot of perhaps too-intense emoting on way too many draggy power-ballads; there are no 'rolling in the deep's. the lyrics don't sustain the always flamboyant and frequently despairing emotion. of course the voice is extremely suited for launching extreme emotional fireworks. but i'd like to hear her with a lot more restraint a lot more often. that would make the geysers more moving.
but...gotta admit it: she's just a trascendently excellent singer. not a soul singer, quite, not in any genre, and not pop as that is understood now: top-40 teenagery music. um, 'adult contemporary' to revive an ancient format. but however we place her, she's like whitney on steroids: true power, true range, that real phase-shifty thing that was whitney's trademark, except that adele does it effortlessly all the time. she could sing anything from broadway to opera to aretha and kind of kill you, i bet. she'll be around for the next fifty years. (plus she was super-charming onstage in that special; cackling and herself yet shy and nervous. both human and killer.)
