no adele thread yet?

bad thread

-- blueski, Friday, January 4, 2008 2:43 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

it's here for the long haul, skip.

― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Friday, January 4, 2008 2:47 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

we did it

20/02/2011 - Adele equals Beatles’ record to lead Official Charts Brits Bonanza

Adele’s Someone Like You rockets up the Official Singles Chart from last week’s number 47 to become the UK’s new number one after her powerful live television performance at last Tuesday’s Brit Awards, while her current album 21 heads the Official Albums Chart for a fourth week, the Official Charts Company announces today.

Not content with achieving the chart double of simultaneous number ones in the nation’s Official Singles and Official Albums charts, the twenty-two-year-old artist boasts two more Top 5 hits this week; her single Rolling In The Deep and her debut album 19 are each at number four in their respective charts.

Adele is the first living artist to achieve the feat of two Top 5 hits in both the Official Singles Chart and the Official Albums Chart simultaneously since The Beatles back in January 1964 when their singles I Want To Hold Your Hand and She Loves You were numbers two and five and their albums With The Beatles and Please Please Me were numbers one and two.

Adele’s phenomenal achievement spearheads a huge surge in sales for all the artists who won or performed at the Brit Awards 2011. Total album sales for Brits’ artists were up 70% week on week with Laura Marling’s album I Speak Because I Can recording the biggest chart leap from last week’s number 80 to this week’s number 21.

Finally listening to 21. I like her, but I really wasn't in a hurry to hear it I guess. Too bad, because this is great!

she's a hack and a journeywoman

http://www.kaitaia.com/funny/g2/d/14063-1/Snoop.gif

She's no hack. Someone Like You is thumpingly predictable - seemingly designed for X-Factor cover versions - which makes the Brits performance all the more impressive.

okay her cover of "Lovesong" is great

It is really good, I was wondering whether you would like it or not.

Tiring though it is to be typing the words "Nabisco OTM" once again, this first para sums up exactly how I felt about the Someone Like You performance:

Sometimes you only really start appreciating someone like Adele when she’s singing a bad song. There’s some workmanlike, blandly tasteful arrangement lolling behind her like a boiled potato; the lyrics have gone all banal; the string section seems to be courting viewers of whichever network-TV drama needs to score a pensive montage ... and yet the main thing you’re thinking is: Who broke Adele’s heart, and why would they do that, and can they not hear how marvelous she is?

Full review here:

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/02/adeles_21_its_the_singer_not_t.html

Why is everyone talking about how it's intentionally constructed for future television use? The songs sound pretty honest to me. I'm I just not as cynical as I used to be?

There's something very generic about the chord changes and arrangement of Someone Like You - it seems calculated and I think the honesty is all in the voice, ie in spite of the song rather than because of it. But then these days it's pretty hard to write a straightforward big-sounding piano ballad that doesn't sound like the closing scenes of Grey's Anatomy.

i fuck w/ this -- the world needs a good dramatic piano ballad every once in a while

her voice gets kinda weird tho when she goes into her upper registers

i loved "chasing pavements" too

i really like rolling in the deep

i really like rolling balls deep

Snrub otm, it's a great single! don't really care for anything else i've heard, but i haven't heard all of 21 yet

her Lovesong cover is an abortion btw, DJP u mad

yeah, the cover of lovesong is awful, easily the worst track on 21.

i mean, it's better than the 311 version, at least, though...

What is with you people over there:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/apr/04/adele-breaks-madonnas-album-record

Adele is some hot garbage son.

crazy how massive she is now

lol fat joek

I kind of despise this woman so it rather irritates me how much I love 'Rolling in the Deep' and 'Set Fire to the Rain'. Thankfully 'Someone Like You' is utter tosh!

True they are better songs. Can't stand her voice though. I just can't understand why she is so popular. Her image seems to appeal to people this kind of 'realness'. The matey, realness in interviews is such a turn off.

Maura notes something:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/05/adele_selling_out_commercials_festivals.php

Thats a great read.

I would love it if no one ever used the term "sell-out" to earnestly describe a professional musician ever again.

(to follow on from Maura's point)

i'm not really under the impression her diyness or whatever is going to be pushed here, "discount" tickets were for $200 in ny

("discount" being through whatever service my benefits provider provides which isn't usually all that much)

Adele never makes any claims to being DIY or having low ticket prices so I don't know what you mean there.

Maura is overstating the Gaga comparison (though it nicely provides her piece with a relevant angle.) eg.

funny, given Lady Gaga's constant assertions that she, too, doesn't lipsync, and writes her own material.

Yet in the Independent piece lip-synching and songwriting are never mentioned and the only contrast made with Gaga is her extreme ubiquity.This interview was covered in the Mail who chose to present a similar set of quotes to elaborate about Adele's anxiety attacks and self-image problems. I suspect this is actually the most common narrative for Adele, rather than as the anti-Gaga/women in music interpretation.

Anyway, I don't really see what Maura is so butthurt at Adele about. It's not even clear if the original Q interview presents these quotes as Adele's "rules". I haven't read the Q interview but most likely these are just random quotes which have been summarized this way by the writer at the Indie. Maura buys the idea that there's some kind of self-righteous personal manifesto at work, which allows for the accusations of supposed hypocrisy ("is autotune OK if you only use it during the marketing of your music?...Is appearing on TV shows for a straight week and taping an episode of Unplugged OK because it's "about the music").

I think you're mistaking what Maura thinks about Adele directly with what she sees as the rhetoric around her -- which, in fact, dovetails completely with your own point!

I realize the article is obstensibly about the media but there's potshots at Adele herself which are groundless - at least based on the Indie article.

I wish people would give the "soulless Autotune" criticism a rest, too.

Again, neither Adele nor the Indie article mention autotune at all.

no, but Maura did

Right. The majority of the supposed signifiers of authenticity mentioned in the VV piece are not present in the Independent article. So what's the point?

Meaning you've never heard anyone complaining about Autotune's supposed inauthenticity at all in any context? Quite a happy life you have.

seems like a bit of a popist knee-jerk reaction to traditional rockism yet as a popist myself has to be said i'm not picking up what she seems to be from the Indie piece. the Q piece hasn't even come out yet! i mean unless she's read it already? doesn't seem so. so this is a Voice piece, about an Independent piece, about a Q piece that no-one's read yet?!

and then the title says that its rebutting other articles that havent even been written yet

xxpost to Ned. A happy life despite many autotune complaints. But the most common complaint I hear about autotune is not really it's lack of "authenticity" but rather that it is aesthetically displeasing and is an extremely over-used production trick.

has to be said the cover looks pretty good!
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/281914/ADELE-Q-MAGAZINE.jpg

I think Maura's piece is a little premature - responding to arguments that haven't been made yet. Why shouldn't Adele adhere to certain principles if she likes?

To be fair, I don't think the point is that Adele shouldn't do what she wants to do; I think Maura is identifying an easy, semi-nonsensical rhetorical stance (Adele vs Gaga) and pointing out why it's stupid before other writers get a chance to latch onto it.

but thats a weird thing to do? surely you could find enough things to write about that you dont need to make up stances that other critics have

It's been an undercurrent to Adele's whole deal/appeal the whole time, though, this sense of a 'real' female singer inspired by 'real' music! Hell, for a lot of recent UK acts -- Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone, Duffy, etc. You can't handwave something that's been intrinsic.

It's not an undercurrent, it's the absolute cornerstone of her marketing/appeal, as much as it is was with Ocean Colour Scene or whoever.

I don't think "weird" is the right way to look at it; it's more that this is a thought piece pointed towards other critics that is also being presented to "the rest of us". The seeds of this are absolutely floating out there; I was listening to a lot of The Current a couple of weeks ago (indie rock public radio based in Minneapolis) during their pledge drive and their playlist was basically super lol indie (The Decemberists got played a HELL of a lot) mixed in with old Public Enemy and many, many, many promos for a competition to win tickets to see Adele. This was all intermingled with testimonials written by people giving pledges hailing the station for playing "real" music (like The Decemberists). It's a small sample size, I admit, but the sentiment Maura is reacting against is out there.

My only beef is with the autotune criticism, which I feel has become its own tired, overused dismissal tactic.

this is another can of worms that i perhaps shouldn't open given that i'm on deadline, but the way in which adele's body image is also conflated with her "realness" has made me kinda uncomfortable of late too - like, it's gone beyond applauding someone who refuses to ~conform~ to the ~ideal~ and into making the logical leap that because she doesn't diet, it makes her a more worthy (or better?) artist - and then you see quotes from her like "my aim in life is never to get skinny" and it's like, well done, you have replaced one weight-based goal with another. and then you see her bringing up nicole richie as someone she doesn't want to look like (someone who's had v public health issues re: her own weight), which is about as tasteless as you get.

xpost Sure, and I can understand the online journalism pressure to respond quickly, even it seems premature. But I do think Adele deserves some credit for the stance she takes on commercials and arena gigs, which is a distinct issue from whether NPR types think her music is "real".

xpost i don't think she can be blamed for 'replacing one weight-based goal with another' just because of one off-hand comment she made in an interview one time.